Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 1-3. Like Loreen Leedy's Measuring Penny (1998), this takes some basic mathematical concepts and illustrates them winningly--in this case, with pizza. The crust (with cheese and tomato sauce) represents a big, fat zero. Toppings, which illustrate numbers from 1 to 20, make things more interesting; combinations not only produce pictures (clocks, maps, flags) on the pizza but also illustrate a little addition, multiplication, and so on. Thirteen onion strips, 14 chives, 15 pepperoni slices, and 16 basil leaves make a pretty impressive cat face, and by the time children get to 100 pieces of topping (mushrooms, peppers, olives, etc.), they'll have learned that Americans eat more than enough pizza every year to make a crust-to-crust path to the moon. The computer-manipulated pizzas are masterworks of food art and may inspire not only counting and fractions but also some cheese and pepperoni decoupage. --GraceAnne DeCandido Copyright 2003 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 4-The math concepts of addition, large numbers, and fractions are illustrated with artfully decorated pizzas depicting a smiling face, a cat, a flag, etc. The accompanying text counts the ingredients: "-five eggplant stars, six red onion strips, seven cheese stripes, and eight red pepper pieces." Numerals are used to show the total of two items, for example, 5 + 6 = 11. Another pie is symmetrically decorated with 100 garnishes and duplicated 10 times on one page and 100 times on the next to illustrate the numbers 1000 and 10,000. Millions and billions are demonstrated by citing the number of pizzas needed to circle the globe and to reach the moon. The book concludes with the pies divided to show fractional concepts. The tone is instructional rather than entertaining, but this title's use for teaching may be complicated by the wide range of topics covered. The concepts are as simple as 1 + 2 = 3 and as complex as choosing the larger fraction between 3/12 and 1/4. Although the text gives some interesting facts about pizza, it sometimes lacks a clear focus. Still, the use of pizza provides a real-life application for learning. It is most effective in illustrating fractional concepts and helping students visualize large numbers.-Adele Greenlee, Bethel College, St. Paul, MN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Near-photorealistic paintings of pizzas (some with themed toppings like a cat or the American flag) illustrate counting to twenty; numbers from hundreds to millions; and, rather unimaginatively, fractions. Pizza facts (its origins in Italy, American pizza consumption, etc.) clutter the text and distract from the already overambitious math content. From HORN BOOK Spring 2004, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Pizzas are fun. It took some relentless didacticism from Dobson to rob them of their simple pleasure. She starts with some playful examples of pizza's possibilities: big, round, and flat, the pie invites decoration as a face, a flag, or a clock. The little factual tidbits that attend the story, set in smaller typeface, are fun at first--for instance, the first pizzas had no tomatoes because Italy had no tomatoes until 1500--but also hint at things to come. What comes is a math class. How many pizzas does it take to feed a giant, how many to reach the Moon? Okay, but then come an endless number of fractions, like the game in which you keep dividing an object in half, never getting to the end. By the time readers reach, "A pizza that is cut into eight equal slices is divided into eights. If you eat four eights of this flower pizza, you will still have one half left," their stomachs are more than full. The facts get less appealing, too--"some people like pesto, which is usually made from basil leaves, olive oil, grated cheese, pine nuts, and garlic"--as does the cheese in Holmes's pizza art, which looks like if you took a bite, you would find it dry and nasty underneath. (Picture book. 5-10) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
