Flashback to the ... awesome '80s

Gr 1--3--Those who lived through the 1980s know it was a totally tubular time, and now kids can ride the nostalgia train with this lighthearted look at the decade. Filled with quick facts and pop culture tidbits, this book lets upper elementary readers imagine what life was like in the days of mixtapes and Saturday morning cartoons. References are age appropriate, highlighting toys, technology, food, and entertainment that American kids of this age would have interacted with had they lived back then. A blend of illustrations and photographs in true-to-period, vivid colors lends clues to the textual information. A brief list of novel words, like "gnarly," appear in a glossary, though phonetic spellings are not provided. The proliferation of exclamation points could seem patronizing to some readers, and this book does not give enough depth to serve as a historical resource. But as a fun topic for reading skill practice, it should spark wide interest. VERDICT This celebration of kid culture in the 1980s will appeal to children and to the adults who remember how awesome it was.--Shannon Titas

Dip a toe into ancient history. Salting her poptastic narrative with slang expressions for extra flava ("People were psyched to talk on cordless phones and leave a message on an answering machine"), Michaels harks back to the fads, fashions, "rad" toys, "gnarly" entertainments, and unwieldy tech that kick-started the millennial generation. The bare lists of names here aren't going to give today's readers much sense of what popular toys or Saturday morning cartoons looked like or why they appealed to those born in the '80s…but even younger children will have no trouble marveling at, say, TVs with no remotes ("you had to manually change the channel!") or, for that matter, seeing the effect on their elders of resurrecting nearly forgotten terms like mullet and boom box. On the whole, however, it's fairly shallow, though a closing suggestion to ask grown-ups for memories or even mementos of the decade may well spark a bit of cozy intergenerational give-and-take. While the children portrayed in the cartoon images are diverse, the stock photos mostly depict White-presenting kids. A superficial jaunt through the age of the Rubik's Cube, Cabbage Patch Kids, and the Walkman. (Informational early reader. 6-8) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.