Sandra Markle

Sep 24, 2024 | kirkusreviews.com | Thor Hanson |Sandra Markle |Kate Messner

Zeroes in on a delightful, quirky aspect of the famed composer’s life. Mozart makes beautiful music with Star, a starling who can imitate many kinds of sounds. In Vienna, even when unusual pets were all the rage, local birds like starlings weren’t very popular. But the story goes that in the spring of 1784, Mozart heard a starling in a pet store sing out one of his own compositions.

Sep 5, 2024 | kirkusreviews.com | Janet Nolan |Emily Cox |Andrew Knapp |Sandra Markle

Texans learn to love the bats that roost under the Congress Avenue Bridge. When a bridge in Austin was renovated in the 1980s, the crevices beneath it became the perfect home for Mexican free-tailed bats, which moved in by the hundreds of thousands. Their human neighbors didn’t welcome them—until a bat biologist, Dr. Merlin Tuttle, explained how beneficial the bats were to the environment; they ate insect pests, which meant farmers didn’t have to rely so heavily on pesticides.

Mar 9, 2024 | kirkusreviews.com | Lynn Brunelle |Sandra Markle |Henry Herz

Infused with wonder, an account of a natural cycle that occurs, mostly, far below the ocean’s surface. Moving “with grace and power, like a dancer,” a blue whale “whirls above and below the currents of the Pacific Ocean” until she dies a natural death.

Nov 4, 2023 | kirkusreviews.com | Andrew Knapp |Sandra Markle

Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media).