K-Gr 2-The Moon gets anthropomorphized in this celebration of the lunar landing. The Moon is the queen of the night sky, but she gets lonely and wishes for a friend. Finally, two astronauts visit, and the Moon gifts them with rocks and dust while they leave her a "handsome plaque" and a "beautiful flag." Too soon they have to leave, but the Moon is left with the hope that she'll host visitors again. This book could be used to introduce the Moon landing to very young audiences, but in its quest for simplicity, a lot of useful information is excluded. The Moon tries to get humanity's attention by traveling in front of the Sun, leaving her shadow on Earth, but the concept of eclipses isn't touched on even in the endnotes. The Moon gets excited when a chimpanzee travels in space in a "United States" branded Mercury capsule, and the American flag is prominently planted on its surface right before the astronauts leave, but there is no mention of the space race or any of the Soviet Union's accomplishments. The five pages of endnotes do offer some more comprehensive information on the Moon and details on the Apollo 11 voyage. VERDICT An additional purchase for large collections.-Kacy Helwick, New Orleans Public Library © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Hill imagines the Apollo 11 moon landing from the perspective of the moon itself. In Paganelli's friendly illustrations, the moon is an anthropomorphic, bright-eyed blue sphere with rosy cheeks who communicates with the changing world throughout history. Despite how she tries to make friends, from saber-toothed tigers to early air balloonists, all of Earth's denizens remain planet-bound. Not even an early airplane can reach her, and "a chimpanzee in a Mercury capsule... returned to Earth without reaching her." At last, the moon meets the astronauts of Apollo 11: "The astronauts walked across her surface with great bounding steps that made her dust bloom." Hill concludes this light moon-landing story with back matter, including photographs, a timeline of the Earth's eras, and details about the Apollo 11 mission. Ages 4-8. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Moon, lonely for so long, welcomes at last a pair of visitors from the planet below.It's a long waitdinosaurs come and go, and likewise woolly mammoths; the pyramids rise; the first balloons and gliders appear; a chimp in a Mercury capsule waves from orbitbut at long last two spacecraft stacked atop a huge multistage rocket make the journey: "They're actually coming!" The Moon, a light blue orb in Paganelli's pastel-toned scenes with big, lashed eyes and pink cheeks, watches in delight, warmly welcomes the two astronauts who land, and gives them gifts of rocks and dust (they in turn leave a plaque and a brightly colored flag) when it's time to go. "Come back anytime!" Hill neglects mention of the earlier and later Apollo visits but enhances her lunarcentric commemoration of Apollo 11 with a detailed if idiosyncratic account of that one and QR codes leading to actual sound clips of the countdown and Neil Armstrong's first remark. Appended notes on the moon, NASA, spacesuits, and the Saturn V rocket also help to give the historic mission some background.One of a flurry of semicentennial tributes, set at least a bit apart by its unusual point of view. (Informational picture book. 5-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

HALF A CENTURY later, the story of the first lunar landing still has the capacity to astound. These picture books, many with all-ages appeal, combine artful, accurate texts and wondrous images to introduce a new generation to the Apollo program - and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. IN CHRIS GALL'S GO FOR THE MOON: A ROCKET, A BOY, AND THE FIRST MOON LANDING (Roaring Brook, 48 pp., $19.99; ages 5 to 10), it's 1969, and a young narrator acts as an earthbound crewmate, keeping pace with the Apollo 11 astronauts from his suburban backyard. Double-page spreads juxtapose the stages of the journey, from launch to triumphant splashdown, with inset images of a Tang-sipping kid in hornrims and sneakers, building and transporting his model rocket, testing out a cardboard lunar module and joyfully bounding through his own moon walk after watching Neil Armstrong's first steps on a fuzzy blackand-white television. Throughout, the boy uses soccer balls, string and other everyday objects to explain underlying concepts such as thrust and landing angles. Working in a crisply delineated digital style that gives shapes an almost 3-D quality, Gall balances densely explanatory pages with wide-angle scenes filled with tension and drama. Readers who want close-ups of fuel cells and docking components will find those specifics, while others can take in the miraculous big picture: the small silver capsules traveling through blackest-black space. Best of all, Gall's young narrator shows how leaps of imagination can transform the grandest milestones into the most personal experiences. IN ANTICIPATION OF this summer's anniversary, Brian Floca set out to update his extraordinary 2009 account of the first moon landing, which was named a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book that year, among other awards. He emerged from the project with a substantially expanded edition, which includes eight new pages of artwork and additional text. The newly revised moonshot: the FLIGHT OF APOLLO 11 (Richard Jackson/Atheneum, 56 pp., $19.99; ages 4 to 10) IS even more glorious than the original, and also more inclusive. Whereas the 2009 edition focused on the three astronauts, here there are more vignettes of the diverse men and women - white, black and brown - whose ingenuity and labor made the mission possible: the "thousands of people, / for millions of parts." New lines of text retain the grace and clarity of Floca's economical free verse while adding information, such as the tricky logistics of spacecraft rendezvous. And as before, Floca's artwork remains an extraordinary delight for a reader of any age. Like the astronauts' own photographs, his expansive, heart-stopping images convey the unfathomable beauty of both the bright, dusty moon and the blue jewel of Earth. SEVERAL NEW BOOKS focus on individuals rather than overviews of the big event. Suzanne Slade's a computer called Katherine: HOW KATHERINE JOHNSON HELPED PUT AMERICA ON THE MOON (Little, Brown, 40 pp., $18.99; ages 4 to 8) picks up the story of the "human computers," of "Hidden Figures" fame. Slade, a mechanical engineer who has worked on rockets for NASA and the Air Force, brings deep background knowledge to her biography of Johnson, an African-American math prodigy who overcame barriers of race and gender to become a profoundly influential member of the Apollo missions' team. Slade writes with appealing rhythm and repetition, and she folds in a clever game of false equations to emphasize moments of injustice: Limited beliefs about women's professional roles, for example, are "as wrong as 10 - 5 = 3." In her picture-book debut, the illustrator Veronica Miller Jamison mixes neatly composed, straightforward action with inventive, swirling images dramatizing Johnson's brilliant calculations. The story is followed by an informational spread that includes a rousing quote from Johnson: "Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing." The astronaut Alan Bean was the fourth person, and the first artist, to walk on the moon. Written with assistance from Bean, Dean Robbins's the astronaut who PAINTED THE MOON: THE TRUE STORY OF ALAN BEAN (Orchard/Scholastic, 40 pp., $17.99; ages 4 to 8) intersperses action scenes from the Apollo 12 mission with moments from Bean's life, as he learns to combine his love of flight with his urgent wish to "paint what he saw." After returning to Earth, Bean is disappointed with photographs that fail to capture the moon's "barren beauty." So, with color and imagination, he paints "how stunning outer space looked through his eyes. How it made him feel." A final striking spread pairs reproductions of photographs taken by Apollo 12's astronauts and Bean's paintings of the same scenes. The astronauts are friendly, relatable characters in Sean Rubin's jewel-colored, crosshatched artwork, which smooths out narrative shifts with skillfully extended motifs, including aircraft that transform from model airplanes to Air Force fighters to the Apollo 12 rocket as the pages turn. And as in Bean's paintings, a brilliant palette animates the scenes of space with vibrant, palpable energy. More than an account of a singular figure, Robbins's notable biography is a beautiful reminder that science and art are a vital combination and, together, can create new understanding. OF COURSE, for some children, the details of the Apollo missions may seem as dull and unappealing as freeze-dried food. Young kids, especially preschoolers, may want to start with something more familiar - the moon itself. Susanna Leonard Hill's MOON'S FIRST FRIENDS: ONE GIANT LEAP FOR FRIENDSHIP (Sourcebooks, 40 pp., $17.99; ages 3 to 6) sparks lunar interest with an age-old approach: Put a face on it. Forget the Man in the Moon (or the rabbit). This cheerful title introduces a rosy-cheeked, eye-lashed "Queen of the Night Sky," lonely after 4.5 billion years of silvery bright solitude. Humans' experiments with early air flight get her hopes up, but alas; she remains alone, despite her efforts to attract attention, including a solar eclipse. Then, "one hot July day," visitors arrive. Elisa Paganelli's textured digital artwork extends the winsome story with a cozy version of space, a soothing, star-speckled blue rather than bottomless black, and watched over by the eager, anthropomorphized "queen," who cheers as the Eagle lands right between her eyes. The book's substantial back matter about the Apollo 11 mission seems aimed at older siblings, rather than the story's primary young audience. A more immediate connection might come from a QR code printed on the endpapers, which leads to NASA's sound file of Neil Armstrong's first words after his ever-astonishing "one small step." GILLIAN ENGBERG is a former editorial director of books for youth at Booklist.