Kobee Manatee: A Wild Weather Adventure

by Robert Scott Thayer BA, Lauren Gallegos BA (Illustrator)

Overview

LEXILE MEASUREMENT: AD560L 
Winner, Silver Medal in the Children's Adventure Category, 2015 Readers' Favorite International Book Awards
Winner, Silver Award in Cover Design in Children's/YA Category, 2016 IBPA's Ben Franklin Awards
Finalist, Children's Educational Category, 2015 USA Best Book Awards

Loaded with surprises and exciting facts about weather, this thrilling tale follows Kobee Manatee as he travels across the mighty Atlantic Ocean into the strong Gulf Stream current . . . during hurricane season! His daring adventure begins when Kobee decides that he wants to surprise his sister Kim, who lives in the Bahamas, on her birthday. Will Kobee and his friends, Tess and Pablo, be able to travel safely from their home in Key West, Florida, through all of the wild tropical weather coming their way? Each page includes in-depth, scientific details titled “Kobee’s Fun Facts,” which expand on the weather events that the characters encounter along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780988326941
Publisher:	Thompson Mill Press
Publication date:	09/08/2015
Series:	Kobee Manatee Series
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.30(d)
Lexile:	AD560L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Robert Scott Thayer is an award-winning recording artist in the pop, jazz, and children’s genres and a member of the Save the Manatee Club in Maitland, Florida. He is the author of Kobee Manatee: Heading Home to Florida. He lives in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Lauren Gallegos is a children’s book illustrator who enjoys hiking and the beauty of nature. She is the illustrator of Vulture Verses: Love Poems for the Unloved. She lives in Brea, California.

What People are Saying About This

Rob Marciano

A rare children's book that gives kids a colorful learning adventure and some weather fun facts parents will enjoy too. --Rob Marciano (ABC News Senior Meteorologist)

Editorial Reviews

“A rare children’s book that gives kids a colorful learning adventure and some weather fun facts parents will enjoy too.”  —Rob Marciano, senior meteorologist, ABC News


“An appealing picture book distinguished by its colorful images, creatively distilled meteorological facts, and simple but dynamic storytelling.”  —Kirkus Reviews


“This vibrantly illustrated and amusing adventure will make learning about weather feel incidental.”   —Foreword Clarion Reviews

From the Publisher

2015-03-20
A manatee and his friends swim across the Gulf Stream and brave a hurricane on their way to the Bahamas in this colorful adventure for young readers.In his second engaging children's picture book, Thayer (Kobee Manatee: Heading Home to Florida, 2013) expertly weaves in true-life weather facts with a simple but eventful tale. A resourceful manatee named Kobee sets out on a 300-mile swim from Key West, Florida, to Nassau with his friends, a hermit crab named Pablo and a purple, pink-maned sea horse called Tess. There, Kobee plans to surprise his sister, Kim, on her birthday. But before the travelers reach the festive celebration, amid the multicolored coral reefs of the Bahamas' warm waters, they face some suspenseful challenges. First, there's a scary waterspout and a thunderstorm at sea: "Two lightning bolts shot right past us. The sky rumbled and roared." A spinning hurricane follows: "The east winds swirled….I went for air just as a GIANT wave spun us around like a washing machine." Throughout the adventure, Kobee is both a navigator and educator; additional facts and figures, boxed and labeled "Kobee's Fun Facts," supplement the manatee's explanations of the weather phenomena that the trio encounter. The book also tells its young audience, in text that doesn't talk down to them, how to protect themselves in a thunderstorm, how storms rotate depending on the hemisphere they occupy, and how to identify different types of clouds: "white, wispy" cirrus, "creamy cotton" cumulus, and cirrocumulus resembling "fish scales." Readers also learn of the two types of waterspouts (tornadic and fair weather), why the sky is blue, the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius, and that "a raindrop falls at an average speed of 17 miles per hour." Despite the book's encyclopedic quality, however, it's a charming, simple story. The illustrations, rendered in colorful acrylic on illustration board, harmonize nicely with the active text, mixing real-world and fantasy elements in lavish sky and ocean settings.An appealing picture book distinguished by its colorful images, creatively distilled meteorological facts, and simple but dynamic storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews