By Kelly Lynn Jones
Chronicle Books, $19.95, 84 pages
Little Paper Planes is a great summer vacation activity book for kids. Its removable pages can be cut out and assembled into paper airplanes. The page layout thoughtfully separates directions and text from the detachable pages, so projects can be repeated or recreated with additional paper. The book has many attractive aspects, starting with the quality of the paper, printing and art. Biographical information about the artists and their own descriptions of their thoughts and works adds more interest for the reader. The book features three fairly standard designs and a few less conventional planes. Readers may be disappointed or delighted to find that some of the offering planes don’t fly. They also will find something entirely different … confetti, boxes, mobiles and explicit invitations and opportunities for the reader/ artist/ engineer to add embellishments to the design offered. The projects in this book assume dexterity beyond operation of safety scissors, and it appears that some of these projects might benefit from additional materials such as tape, glue, sticks and strings. The creative reader will likely find inspiration for additional projects and artwork based on the examples in these projects, such as origami, or decoupage, or other forms of paper art.
Reviewed by Brenda Searle
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