As the World Burns

May 1, 2008
Gr 10 Up-This simply drawn graphic satire is largely message-driven, but the message is still entertaining and thought-provoking. As the lighthearted lead character shares what governments, corporations, and activists tell individual Americans to do to save the Earth, her cynical counterpart exposes the futility of these simple solutions. The truth is, even if each and every one of us switched to compact fluorescent bulbs and became vegetarians it would only be a drop in the bucket compared to the damage corporate and government policies are doing to the world environment. The story that binds these notions together is an upcoming alien invasion and a renegade bunny trying to end animal experimentation. The characters are crudely drawn with bare sets, but this style works in a tale in which the words are carrying so much weight. (The politicians have sharper teeth than the bears.) This book doesnt offer up any real answers to what is clearly portrayed as a frightening state of affairsit includes an animal uprising. However, it will inflame teens passion about the environment and possibly open more eyes."Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD"

Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2007
Readers exasperated with, or just plain tired of, simplistic guides offering purportedlyquick and easy ways to resolve global warming and other momentous concerns of the day will delight in this razor-sharp critique packaged as a cute-kid-and-funny-animal cartoon. Bypassing allegory and providing plain, unvarnished facts, Jensen and McMillan present a human activist who argues against her friends sentimentality, a U.S. president mouthing inglorious lines about the power of faith over practice and corporate power over humane stewardship, and a one-eyed bunny who gets the revolution rolling by freeing his fellow creatures from a vivisectionists lab. The flat black-and-white, pseudo-naive images pack an expressive wallop even when successive panels and pages consist only of talking heads. Jensen and McMillan succeed because they eschew simplicity and denial and open up the complications and grave choices we must engage to put the brakes on the wholesale destruction of the earth on which contemporary Western culture depends. They roll critical thinking and well-structured graphic-novel storytelling into a compelling whole.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)