From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This book is a delightfully devastating indictment of our fossil-fuel culture - specifically internal combustion engines! Written by Janelle London, Matthew Metz, and I'm pleased to say, with a fair-shake (for once in a children's book!) given to a talented artist: Ilya Fortuna, this rhyming and full color illustration book for young kids describes how bad internal combustion engines are (transportation contributes about a third of our climate change problem), without getting preachy and without getting bogged down by too much detail.
The magic hamster frankly to me, looks a bit more like a guinea pig, but I've had both as pets in my youthful years, and I'm not going to quibble about that when it's so delightfully drawn. The book briefly lays out the story of how oil came to be formed, and how it's extracted, and what it does when it's burned - returning all that sequestered carbon into the atmosphere quickly and in large volume. I love this book and commend it fully. We can only hope that the children who will read this will still have a planet worth saving by the time they get old enough to do something about the disaster that we adults are still, even now and knowing what we know, hell-bent on creating for them.
