Charlotte's bones The Beluga whale in a farmer's field

Poetic text describes an Ice Age beluga whale's life with her pod and her (somewhat jarring) death; Charlotte's fossilized bones are discovered 11,500 years later in 1849 Vermont. How the fossils helped scientists understand ways the land had changed makes for interesting reading, but concluding messages from the bones ("'Time goes by fast,' they say") is a melodramatic touch. Extensive notes provide additional information. Reading list. Glos. (c) Copyright 2019. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The story of Charlotte, Vermont's official state marine fossil.Rounds labors to draw a poetic message from the 11,500-year-old bones of a beluga that were unearthed in 1849 some 150 miles from the sea (" I was alive like you,' they say. / Time goes by fast,' they say. / The Earth is both strong and fragile' ") That's a stretch, but her reconstruction of the whale's likely history and her much-lengthier appended noteson belugas, on who discovered the fossil, on what its discovery implied about the area's prehistory, on glaciation in the Champlain Valley, and on Ice Age mammals of the region both extant and extinctoffer more than enough for readers to absorb and ponder. Carver supplies full-bleed landscapes stocked with woolly mammoths and musk oxen; views of "Charlotte" swimming with her pod, trapped in a tide pool, and then decomposing in stages; 19th-century workers (their faces indistinct but some, at least, possibly people of color) excavating a rail bed; a white naturalist (Zadock Thompson, unnamed in the main narrative) laying the bones out on a floor for study; and finally the assembled fossil in its modern exhibit case. Not exactly seamless but all in all a substantial introduction to a significant North American fossil. (map, glossary, resource list) (Informational picture book. 7-9) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.