Thunder Underground

Home to organisms, minerals, and buried treasure, the subterranean world is the subject of Yolen's 21 poems, written in a variety of rhyming and nonrhyming forms. Masse's crisp, gently textured mixed-media illustrations show a black girl and white boy imaginatively exploring what lurks beneath their feet, starting in the basement: "cables, pipes,/ the basic foundation,/ a storage,/ a story,/ the oldest page." In subsequent poems, Yolen pays tributes to the natural ("Oh, to be an ant,/ neat, quiet, indifferent/ to anything but constant work") and the man-made ("I like the sound the subway makes/ deep in its underground den"), as well as musing on lost cities, pirate treasure, and "magma pools/ Becoming rock/ When magma cools." Blending creativity with scientific fact, Yolen's poems appeal to readers' imaginations and intellects alike. Ages 5-10. Author's agent: Elizabeth Harding, Curtis Brown. Illustrator's agent: Lori Nowicki, Painted Words. (Mar.)

K-Gr 3--"Beneath our feet,/a world apart,/is found our Earth's fast-beating heart./It keeps us living,/soil and root,/while up above/we eat the fruit." Twenty-one pithy poems focus on the world below in this well-designed volume. Bookended by two insightful poems and expanding on the word under (underground, understand, understood), all the verse in between explores under the house, the city, and the ground. Through a variety of poetic forms, readers will meet ants, worms, and moles; uncover buried history, cities, and treasure; and brush up on the science of magma, plate tectonics, and earthquakes. The text embodies wonder and factual information, piquing readers' interest along the way. The detailed illustrations, done in mixed media, tie the book together and provide little Easter eggs for kids to notice on every page. Back matter includes "Notes on the Poems: Both Scientific and Personal," which will help to engage readers with the topic in a more meaningful way.