Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Why and how to make a rain garden. Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun. Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7) Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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This upbeat problem-solving story starts as rain begins to fall in a neighborhood portrayed with colorblock buildings. Gómez (Very Good Hats) renders children of various skin tones in the windows of a yellow school bus, like wooden dolls gazing out at the downpour. Elsewhere, a child pedestrian with brown skin gazes into a gutter, where “oil and grime and mud” from the street wash into waterways, “clogging rivers, ponds, and lakes.” Is there a way to “lessen all this mess? YES!” reads a page showing a queue of schoolchildren alongside a rain-slickered adult. The kids roll a rain barrel to catch water from the school’s downspout (“Water saved for droughty days”), then engineer a stream for the overflow to run into a “spongy, pooling place.” The saucer of land is next planted with native varieties that have “tough, thick roots” and “filter out that grime and soil” as the rain percolates into the ground and attracts new wildlife. Schaub (Kindness is a Kite String) uses onomatopoeia (“Plink. Plip. Plop.”) and emphatic statements (“FLOOD!”) to convey the feel of water’s halt and flow in this low-tech guide to rain gardens. Further instructions conclude. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Lisa Amstutz, Storm Literary. Illustrator’s agent: Rebecca Sherman, Writers House. (Mar.)