Green Machine: The Slightly Gross Truth about Turning Your Food Scraps into Green Energy

by Rebecca Donnelly, Christophe Jacques (Illustrator)

Overview

From Cats Are a Liquid author Rebecca Donnelly, Green Machine is a playful nonfiction picture book celebrating innovation in the energy cycle with food waste composting—featuring illustrations by Christophe Jacques.

Composting is cool!

Celebrate the innovation and science that helps turn your food waste into green energy. See how food scraps are composted, collected, and processed, transforming trash into biogas and electricity. It’s a green machine! It’s a celebration of sustainability and the important role we humans play in the energy cycle. Share it at Earth Day and every day!

*Longlisted for the Nature Generation Green Earth Book Award

Call it Peels on Wheels/ Or a truck full of yuck:/ It's a food scraps collection machine!/ It takes all the waste/ (And some slime, and some muck)/ To a place where the garbage goes green.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250304063
Publisher:	Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	10.20(w) x 10.20(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Rebecca Donnelly was born in England and has lived in California, Florida, and New Mexico. She has an MA in Humanities and a Master’s in Library and Information Science. She is the author of many best-loved books for children, including Cats Are a Liquid (nominated for the Mewbery Award), How Slippery Is a Banana Peel?, and Super Spaghetti. Her debut middle-grade novel, How to Stage a Catastrophe, was an Indies Introduce/Kids’ Indie Next pick. Rebecca lives in and writes from northern New York.

Christophe Jacques has wanted to be an artist since he was a kid. He loves to create bright worlds with lots of colors and happy faces. Green Machine is his picture book debut. He lives and works in Flanders, Belgium.

Editorial Reviews

03/09/2020

Confusing text choices weaken this rhyming introduction to green energy, which follows food “from the farm to the town, to the market, the kitchen, the plate,” into the compost pile, and off to the processing plant. In Jacques’s retro-mod cartoon illustrations, a green truck (“Call it Peels on Wheels or a truck full of yuck”) collects materials from green recycling bins, taking them to a large stinky tank “where trash becomes gas” and large, goggle-eyed microbes peer out from their “slow, murky work.” Unfortunately, the text zips by complex ideas, such as anaerobic digestion and biogas, without initial explanation, and the lines seem to favor cadence over clarity (“It’s airtight in there, no O2 for these bugs,/ tiny microbes that eat food plus poop”), which may prove perplexing to readers not already in the know. An illustrated diagram at the end clarifies the process, and endnotes make the case for green energy and belatedly explain anaerobic digestion. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Through flowing, rhyming text, Donnelly introduces young readers to composting and its benefits to the environment . . . a strong addition to children’s nonfiction collections, perfect for story time as well as classroom discussion" —Booklist on Green Machine: The Slightly Gross Truth about Turning Your Food Scraps into Green Energy

"An introduction to the innovative (and smelly) processes that turn municipal food waste into electrical energy . . . timely, basic information about transforming food into fuel." —Kirkus Reviews on Green Machine: The Slightly Gross Truth about Turning Your Food Scraps into Green Energy

From the Publisher

2019-12-08
An introduction to the innovative (and smelly) processes that turn municipal food waste into electrical energy.

Donnelly follows the journey of food scraps from kitchen through composting bin and collection truck to a municipal digester, where the waste undergoes both human-engineered and microbe-assisted transformations. The author subjects her text to syllabic verse in rhymed triplets, a choice that places meter above clarity. Describing the digester, she writes: "A place where the waste / isn't wasted: a tank / with the power to power our town, / where trash becomes gas, / and good riddance—that stank! / That's the power of food breaking down." Jacques' illustrations adopt a retro, mid-20th-century look. Cutaways reveal the simplified inner works of the digester tank and electrical generator. Diverse workers are depicted in rather static poses; the featured family members have dark hair, varied brown skin tones, and minimally rendered, dot-and-comma facial features. "Tiny" microbes appear as large, colorful critters with googly eyes and smiles; there's no indication that in reality they're invisible to human eyes. A double-page summary ("Follow the Food Energy!") reuses illustrations from previous pages to illustrate the food-to-electricity process. Within two concluding pages of facts, fossil fuels are characterized as "nonrenewable," without mention of their dominant role in the climate crisis.

Constrained verse distracts from timely, basic information about transforming food into fuel. (further reading) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Reviews