A HUMAN CORPSE becomes fertile loam for gentle grasses. Bees do little dances for one another that communicate detailed topographies. The oil from whales formed part of the nitroglycerine explosives used in World War II. The magnetic polarity of the earth totally reverses every once in a while, too, we may as well add. The most basic consequences of the facts of our natural world can read as far more magical than any spirit or bending spoon, save we so rarely see nature in that way - for what it is. These four new picture books that focus on nature don't just instill wonder, they renew it. Each one, in telling a relatively straight story of the natural world, reminds us of how much wilder nature is even than our loopiest imaginings. In THE HONEYBEE (ATHENEUM, 48 PR, $17.99; ages 4 to 8), the author Kirsten Hall ("The Jacket") teams up with the gently magnificent illustrator Isabelle Arsenault ("Cloth Lullaby," "Colette's Lost Pet") to bring readers the story of one year, from spring to spring, with the honeybees of a single hive. Hall's charming text proceeds in lightly cadenced lines that mostly rhyme: "Come now, Rest. Join our nest. Huddle and cuddle, the winter's our test." Arsenault's illustrations capture something of the alien vision of bees - bees see a "bee purple" in flowers that is invisible to us - through a neon orange that she uses sparingly amid paler gouache, pencil and ink landscapes. Her flowers and grasses are drawn impressionistically, while the bees themselves are made more emotionally legible with cartoonish eyes and even smiles. Children will love tracing the erratic paths of the honeybees, and come away with a not too distorted sense of the little honey factory inside the unprepossessing, and previously terrifying, hive. The hexagons of honeycomb, as drawn by Arsenault, seem so perfect as to be fanciful precisely when they are fact. HAWK RISING (ROARING BROOK, 48 PP. $18.99; ages 4 to 9), with words by Maria Gianferrari ("Coyote Moon") and illustrations by the Caldecott medalist Brian Floca ("Locomotive," "Princess Cora and the Crocodile"), has a more naturalistic tone, even as the awesomeness of the central bird of prey makes the book read intensely, in the manner of a ghost story. The reader of "Hawk Rising" is set in alliance with two sisters who are watching a father hawk nested near their home. Over the course of the day, he needs to find food for the three hungry chicks in his nest. The prose is not cute, but instead informative and painterly: "Black talons curving onto wood. Hooked beak, sharp as a knife. Head turning. Eyes searching. Chicks waiting." Gianferrari admirably doesn't shy away from precise language, which a child loves to have at hand perhaps even more than an adult does: The hawk doesn't just fly and attack, he rides the wind "like a wave, twisting and turning, kiting and floating." Children's stories about predators generally either choose to make the predator a villain, or to somehow obscure the predator's way of life. "Hawk Rising" does something more honest and more interesting - it simply watches. We see the father hawk failing to get a chipmunk, then harried by crows, then failing to catch sparrows. We see the claws of the hawk up close from the prey's perspective, and we also see the hawk's hungry chicks. Finally the hawk, spotting a squirrel - a squirrel lovingly detailed in a full-spread Audubon-like drawing - succeeds in catching its prey. The expression Floca puts on the watching younger sister's face is wonderfully ambivalent as we see her watching the father hawk fly off, the squirrel in his talons silhouetted against "the navy-blue sky." The story's final move draws attention to the uneasy unity between the humans and the hawks. "Through the night, safe in your nests, you and the Hawk family sleep." HEARTBEAT (ATHENEUM, 56 PR, $17.99; AGES 4 to 8), written and illustrated by Evan Turk ("Muddy"; "The Storyteller"), also focuses tightly on one species: whales. "Heartbeat," however, finds its throughline across time and taxonomy, linking whales and humans through the centuries. The illustrations tell most of this story, while the spare, incantatory prose mostly sets the tone. We see a fetal whale's heart beating near its pregnant mother's. The baby is born, but soon the mother is speared, though this is presented somewhat abstractly, through intrusions of harsh white. The mother's body rises and then becomes a light, then a hundred lights, a million lights, then part of war, eventually even part of mankind's exploration of space. Meanwhile the baby whale longs for its mother. Near the end of the book a young girl at the prow of a ship sees the surviving whale, older now. In sync with the whale's heartbeat and song, she is moved to promise to protect the one ocean, one sea, one song. Turk's intense color palette throughout is mostly inky purples and carmines, interrupted by white cut-outs. You leave this book with the sense of having overheard an unsettling but beautiful lullaby. THE FOREST (ENCHANTED LION, 72 PR, $25.95; ages 4 and up), with words by Ricardo Bozzi (translated from the Italian by Debbie Bibo) and illustrated by Violeta Lopiz and Valerio Viðali, follows the metaphorical associations of a story of nature even farther. This is an essentially existential children's book, which imagines human life itself as an exploration through that famed and sometimes dark forest in which we have often been said to find ourselves. Like pretty much every title published by the small, independent Enchanted Lion books, it is a gorgeous, singular, unimprovable book. The story starts: "It is an enormous, ancient forest that has not yet been fully explored." Inside, a series of bas-reliefs and cut-outs on plain paper shows us first a baby, then a young child... and on through to an old, wrinkled face that eventually yields, becoming lines in a landscape from which new greenery grows. Between the images of a human aging, we see forests, jungles and fields, with animals and humans making their way, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group. Somehow "The Forest" is a work of art that escapes feeling like an "art object" - it succeeds in being for children. The ink on its mylar dust jacket makes a distinctively beautiful sound. The eye-holes and occasional unfoldings alter a reader's sense of space. "It is said that the forest has a certain limit if you look straight ahead, but the sides are boundless." This book takes on even death: "At the end of the climb there is a ravine into which each explorer will eventually fall, despite the precautions taken and the advancements of science." This fall didn't bother my 4-year-old at all. She took interest in the new seedlings, the disappearance of the textured pages, and the return of the pines. RIVKA GALCHEN'S most recent book is "Little Labors."

Halls nimble rhyming verse and Arsenaults warm illustrations provide an up-close visit with a friendly colony of anthropomorphized honeybees. Smiling bees sip nectar and collect pollen from flowers, then return to the hive (here, a rarely seen wild one) to communicate vital flower-finding information to the next foraging group: Dance for us, foragers! / Show us the way! Inside the hive, house bees work to reconstitute the nectar and pack the honeycomb cells with nectar-plaster, which eventually becomes liquid gold--i.e., honey. The book hovers between fiction and information; the solid if limited facts are conveyed in an impressionistic style. Theres no discussion of development and care of young, for example, and why bees produce honey is only alluded to (And only when / its needed most-- / a hungry day-- / will these vaults / be tapped). The texts varied rhythms mimic a bees movements in a summery world; that atmosphere is captured in the mixed-media illustrations muted palette of mostly yellow, gray, brown, and beige. Bright pops of yellow-gold are used sparingly for pollen, honey, and a few flowers (others are rendered in soft reds and blues). Halls appended page-long letter to readers (packed with bee wordplay) provides more information about pollination and emphasizes what readers can do to help protect honeybees. kitty Flynn (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* In bouncy, lilting verse and vibrant, inviting artwork, this ode to the humble honeybee is dripping with charm: This is the flower the bee has chosen. / This is the flower the pollen grows in. / This is the flower, its color so bright / its sweet blooming scent calls the bee from its flight. Hall's lively lines skitter around Arsenault's warm, honey-colored illustrations packed with jostling, abstract plants and cheerful bees with cartoonishly huge eyes. The bees buzz around the pages, seeking out flowers, bringing nectar back to the hive, making honey, and locking it up tight in their honeycombs, before nestling together through the long, cold winter. With occasional speech balloons and delightfully expressive gestures, the bees mirror the gleeful tone of the poem, as do the handwritten fonts in varying sizes. Arsenault's scenes are a captivating mixture of smudgy charcoals, soft yellows, and fluorescent oranges, combining crisp shapes with more abstract figures. The entertaining tone and freewheeling art are a pure joy, but there's plenty of science here, too, and a closing note about the importance of bees to our ecosystem brings the point home. Boisterously written, gorgeously illustrated, and sneakily educational.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2018 Booklist

The plight of the endangered honeybee is the raison d'être of this story, Hall (The Jacket) explains in a concluding note, though it's a long and twisty flight to reach it. Readers hear the first bee ("It's closer, it's coming, it's buzzing, it's humming...") before they see it arrive and land on a flower in search of nectar. The singsong verse is aflutter with strained rhyming: "There now, it drills now,/ the bee sips and spills now,/ there now, it swills now, it sits oh-so-still now./ There now, it fills now, it's back to the hill now...." After the bee's buzzing summons others to mealtime, they all swarm back to the hive to begin the honey-making process, whose description may need translating by adults: "We suck out the nectar, we suck it straight through./ Chew, chew-we're changing its makeup, we're giving the nectar a chemical shake-up." Dominated by golden hues punctuated with splashes of neon yellow, the airy mixed-media art by Arsenault (Cloth Lullaby) helps kids decipher the goings-on, in and out of the hive. Tips on how to help preserve the bee population follow the story. Ages 4-8. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

PreS-Gr 2-Hall celebrates honeybees with a lyrical poem. She hears a bee among the flowers, then finds and follows it as it searches for nectar, gathers pollen, and returns to the hive to dance. She watches other foragers leave as house bees make the nectar into honey. The bees huddle quietly with their queen through the long winter, reemerging in the spring. This simplifies the process slightly, but doesn't diminish the wonder. These well-crafted rhyming couplets beg to be read aloud. Set on gloriously illustrated pages and nicely paced, the text appears to be hand printed in varying fonts, becoming part of Arsenault's light and lively illustrations done in ink, gouache, pencil, and colored pencil. The artist uses neon orange to great effect, highlighting the pollen bees find and carry off. (Adult readers may want to point out that bees see the world's color very differently.) After the busyness of summer work, a wordless spread-a snowy landscape where the hive hangs peacefully from a tree-emphasizes the quiet rest of winter. Yellow-and-black striped endpapers and an embossed cover add to the effect. While the narrative and illustrations will appeal to very young listeners, the back matter, which touches on current threats, seems addressed to older children, suggesting ways in which they can help honeybees survive. VERDICT A sweet success; purchase for most shelves.-Kathleen Isaacs, -Children's Literature -Specialist, Pasadena, MD © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Children will be buzzing to learn more about honeybees after reading this story.Hall takes her readers on a sunny romp through a springtime pasture abuzz with friendly honeybees in this bright and cheerful picture book. Hall's rhyme scheme is inviting and mirrors the staccato sounds of a bee buzzing. At times, however, meaning seems to take a back seat to the rhyme. The bees are suggested to "tap" while flying, a noise that adult readers might have trouble explaining to curious listeners. Later, the "hill" the bees return to may elicit further questions, as this point is not addressed textually or visually. Minor quibbles aside, the vocabulary is on-point as the bees demonstrate the various stages of nectar collection and honey creation. Arsenault's illustrations, a combination of ink, gouache, graphite, and colored pencil, are energetic and cheerful. Extra points should be awarded for properly illustrating a natural honeybee hive (as opposed to the often depicted wasp nest). The expressive bees are also well-done. Their faces are welcoming, but their sharp noses hint at the stingers that may be lurking behind them. Hall's ending note to readers will be appreciated by adults but will require their interpretation to be accessible to children. A sensible choice for read-alouds and STEAM programs. Readers (and listeners) will think that this book is the bee's knees. (Picture book. 6-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.