Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts

Monday, November 1, 2021

Jake and Ava A Boy and a Fish by Jonathan Balcombe, Rebecca Evans

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had thought this would be another grandpa fishing story, but it turned out to be a whole other kettle of fish, and being a lifelong vegetarian myself, I fully approved! It's a great book to be reviewing as the COP26 goes on right now.

I admired the stance taken here, because it's a very hard sell in the USA where everyone grows up feeling they have the innate right to rape and pillage nature and the hell with the consequences, and very few people ever truly question it - not really question it. But the fact is that life doesn't work the way most Americans like to comfortably think it does. The world isn't our oyster. Nature isn't here for us, and it isn't endlessly resilient. Now this self-centered 'I own it' attitude is coming back around to bite us, and we're starting to learn some hard lessons.

Fortunately Jake learns an easy lesson when he goes on the traditional fishing trip with grandpa. I never did go an any trips with any grandpas, but I would definitely have been Jake had I done so! They find a nice creek to set a lure and sit there waiting for a bite. This is how we mimic the manly man 'conquering' nature. Sad, isn't it? Meanwhile we get the underwater story too, as an uncle and his niece - archer fish - go out hunting themselves, and Ava is the fish who mistakenly bites on Jake's lure.

Jake chooses compassion for the fish and lets her go. He will never know it was Ava, and she will never know it was Jake, but that was decidedly a magical moment! I fully commend this book as both a worthy read and an unexpected and unusual bonus. And I wish it all the success in the world.

The Adventures of Johnny Butterflyseed by Tarisa Parrish, Stephanie Richoll

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

The United States is a nation not known for its love of monarchs - in fact, its very existence is due to overturning one. Whether that historical lack of respect has any bearing on the plight of the present day monarch butterfly is an open question, but these are modern day monarchs which are suffering every bit as much as King George 3rd did with his mystery illness. They're just suffering in a different way.

With the solid words of Parrish, based on real-life experience, and the beautiful art of Richoll and her charming butterfly girls, this book tells a short story of how every one of us can become a 'butterfly farmer' and help grow the milkweed that in turns grows the monarchs, and will help them recover from farming practices that have not been the monarch's friend - nor the friend to a host of other wildlife either.

For me the language of the story was a bit overly-florid at times, but it was about flowers and butterflies after all, so I guess I can't complain about that! I did love the story, and especially the can-do positivity, as well as the idea that everybody can pitch in here, and I fully commend this as a worthy read.

The Happy Owls by Celestino Piatti

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Boldly drawn and colored by the author, this book is short and sweet and very much to the point, if only you're open to the message! The owls always seem content, cooing softly in their tumble-down ruin of a building. Meanwhile in the nearby farmyard, the animals are always feeding their faces and then squabbling. The wise owls try to explain that they should enjoy the moment, live for the now, and enjoy each new season as it comes around once more, but the impatient farmyard critters don't seem to get it. The owls do though and that's all that matters to them! They can't force others to understand. The story was entertaining and surprisingly deep and warm, and I commend this as a worthy read.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Sexus Animalis by Emmanuelle Pouydebat

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Subtitled "There Is Nothing Unnatural in Nature" and written with a delightfully playful sense of humor, this books explores a sampling of animal (including non-vertebrates) sexual behaviors and appendages, making for an incredible read. And I mean that literally - it's hardly possible to credit some of these things, although I have no doubt that they're true.

There's the water boatman, for example, which has - and I am stating this correctly - the loudest penis in the world, for its size. There is a fish, known o-fish-ially as the Phallostethus cuulong, that is quite ltierally, a dick head. Since there was a walrus, it would have been nice to have included a carpenter - ant, but I guess that was too much to hope for! I suppose there's nothing particularly special about the ants when it comes to this subject. There's the clownfish - and this ain't your children's Nemo. I've concluded they get their name from the clowning around they do with lines of succession, and gender changes. And the young have a brief rumspringa, too!

Oh yes. Any idiot creationists who try to claim that their god made everything to perfection just a few thousand years ago and exactly as we see it now, will have some serious work to do to supply intelligent explanations for the variety of behaviors - some of which are despicable - that their creator purportedly made. The bedbug comes immediately to mind. It's equipped with a literal weapon - it's not just a euphemism in the case of a bedbug. It's supplied with a beveled penis that stabs right through the female's exoskeleton and it doesn't matter - to the male - where penetration is made. This is only one story of such brutality. There's also rape in the animal kingdom: it's not just a human thing.

On a much more pleasant note, there is also love in the animal kingdon - at least amongst the higher species - which includes rats! There are also gay relationships and transgender changes, and masturbation, so as they say, there's nothing new under the sun and not a whole heck of a lot of difference between animals and humans - who are also animals - when it comes to sexual expression.

There is over thirty such stories of amazing variety included here: of impressive stamina and record-setting activity, along with numberous asides that are relevant if slightly off the main topic. The book made for a perverse and fascinating read and I commend it fully.

Friday, October 22, 2021

Boris the Cat by Erwin Moser

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Subtitled, "The Little Cat with Big Ideas." this book was well-illustrated and in color, and the stories I read were amusing, but why it was issued in a Kindle format is utterly beyond me. I've said it repeatedly: unless your text is plain vanilla (with not even dropcaps!), then nine times out of ten, or worse, Amazon's crappy Kindle coversion process will turn your book into kindling - especially if it has images. This one was totally mangled with text and images out of place and mismatched. In other formats the book was considerably better, but even then there was a problem.

The book had almost seventy stories and they're collected into groups by the four seasons, but my copy had only ten stories from 'the spring collection'. The rest of the stories were missing even though they were listed in the content list. And there was no way to tap from the content list to any of the stories, nor was there any way to get back to the contents by, say, tapping on the story title, so this was a serious problem. One reason I'm quitting reviewing books at the end of this year is because of this shabby treatment of reviewers by publishers and Net Galley. I don't expect to get a nice pristine print copy to review by any means, but I do expect to be treated decently, and reviewers deserve better than this.

Since this was an ARC, I checked back on the Net Galley website to see if I'd been sent a sample only, and there was nothing there to indicate any such thing, so I can only assume something got monumentally cocked-up along the way. Anyway this review is of only those ten stories, all of which are about animals and Boris's interaction with them. This is the kind of story where nearly all of the animals walk around on two legs and are all the same size, regardless of species! There are no speech balloons, just descriptive text and equally descriptive and amusing imagery, and each story consists of six such images. Why that is, I do not know!

That said, the stories were amusing to me. I'm not sure why Boris is credited so much with big ideas, but the ones we saw, from a variety of sources, were inventive in a Heath Robinson sort of a way, and were in fact reminiscent of the Mr Bean TV show, so if you've seen that and enjoyed it, you may well find this amusing. I loved the absurdist and off-the-wall humor. These were wacky enough to make me chuckle, so on that basis, and keeping in mind that I was able to read barely more than 10% of this book, I commend it as a worthy read.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Sparky's Electrifying Tale by Janelle London, Matthew Metz, Ilya Fortuna

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book is a delightfully devastating indictment of our fossil-fuel culture - specifically internal combustion engines! Written by Janelle London, Matthew Metz, and I'm pleased to say, with a fair-shake (for once in a children's book!) given to a talented artist: Ilya Fortuna, this rhyming and full color illustration book for young kids describes how bad internal combustion engines are (transportation contributes about a third of our climate change problem), without getting preachy and without getting bogged down by too much detail.

The magic hamster frankly to me, looks a bit more like a guinea pig, but I've had both as pets in my youthful years, and I'm not going to quibble about that when it's so delightfully drawn. The book briefly lays out the story of how oil came to be formed, and how it's extracted, and what it does when it's burned - returning all that sequestered carbon into the atmosphere quickly and in large volume. I love this book and commend it fully. We can only hope that the children who will read this will still have a planet worth saving by the time they get old enough to do something about the disaster that we adults are still, even now and knowing what we know, hell-bent on creating for them.

Octopus, Seahorse, Jellyfish by David Liittschwager

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Note that reviewers such as myself are allowed only an ebook version and in this case only a 16 page sample of the actual book, so it's hard to make a good judgment from this. It's not like it's a work of fiction where you can read a few pages and tell pretty quickly if the book is well-written or a piece of trash, so this review is only of the sample I received, of which only five pages were the actual book, the rest being introductory preface, contents, etc. So not much of a sample!

The second problem with getting only the ebook version is that you can't comment on the print version, nor can I say if this is ever going to be released as an ebook. I suspect not, but that's just an opinion. The problem with the ebook is that the publisher made the dire mistake of releasing it in Kindle format. I have said this many times and I say it again: unless your book is plain vanilla text (without even so much as dropcaps) it's a grave mistake to put it into Kindle format because Amazon's crappy Kindle process will, nine times out of ten, reduce it to kindling. In the Kindle version, viewed on an a standard iPad, it trashed pictures, slicing and dicing and Julienning them turning the book into a disordered jumble. The book looked much better in Blue Fire Reader and in Adobe Digital Editions.

The pictures, when presented properly, were beautiful to look at and the supporting text informative. Based on this sample alone, the book appears to be a worthy read.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Will You be the I in Kind? by Julia Cook, Jomike Tejido

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a gorgeously- and diversely-illustrated (by Jomike Tejido) and sweetly written (by Julia Cook) picture book about putting the 'I' in kind by stepping up when kindness is called for, and setting a good example for others to follow. Several examples are given,such as offering to help up someone who has fallen down, by having a ready smile, by making sure trash gets into the trash bin where it belongs, by taking an interest in others, and by letting a young kid go before you if you're waiting in a long line.

This is a good sentiment and we often forget to follow it for a variety of reasons, which is why a reminder such as this one is so helpful. I commend this book as a worthy read.

Geckos Don't Blink by Kelly Tills

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the first to two related books I got for review purposes from Net Galley. They were by the same author, and were two small volumes in a series of short, illustrated children's books about interesting animal facts, which I thought might be fun. The problem was that they both were unreadable.

They came in three reading options. One was the Kindle version, which I knew would be a disaster, but which I sent to my Kindle app anyway, and got exactly what I'd expected. Actually I got less than I expected, because I expected at least to have some images that were sliced, diced, and julienned, which is what Kindle routinely does to anything that's not plain vanilla text. Instead I got completely blank screens! This isn't even the kindling I expected Amazon's crappy, limited, and destructive system to deliver.

Not losing heart, I progressed to one of the two other options Net Galley offered, which was an epub format. Usually there is no problem here, but in this case, it was almost as bad as the Kindle. At least I could see the images for the book's pages, but they were truncated. Normally, if a book runs to two pages, you half-expect it to be chopped up in electronic format, but the other half of the image was not on the next screen - it was gone completely! This meant that sometimes the image had been chopped, but usually it meant that the text had been curtailed and was unreadable because so much of it was missing.

Finally, there was a Net Galley reading app format, which normally is acceptable, but with which I've occasionally had problems. In this case, what I got was exactly the same result I got from the epub version: seriously bowdlerized images and text. Both of these books suffered the same problems. I honestly do not know how a publisher can distribute a book in this condition. Did no one think to check?! I imagine these books were designed from the ground up as print books, but we reviewers still need them to be legible in the electronic version!

Normally I like to positively review children's books if they have any redeeming features at all, but this one had zero. Consequently I have no choice but to declare this book warty to the max!

Cows Have No Top Teeth by Kelly Tills

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the first to two related books I got for review purposes from Net Galley. They were by the same author, and were two small volumes in a series of short, illustrated children's books about interesting animal facts, which I thought might be fun. The problem was that they both were unreadable.

They came in three reading options. One was the Kindle version, which I knew would be a disaster, but which I sent to my Kindle app anyway, and got exactly what I'd expected. Actually I got less than I expected, because I expected at least to have some images that were sliced, diced, and julienned, which is what Kindle routinely does to anything that's not plain vanilla text. Instead I got completely blank screens! This isn't even the kindling I expected Amazon's crappy, limited, and destructive system to deliver.

Not losing heart, I progressed to one of the two other options Net Galley offered, which was an epub format. Usually there is no problem here, but in this case, it was almost as bad as the Kindle. At least I could see the images for the book's pages, but they were truncated. Normally, if a book runs to two pages, you half-expect it to be chopped up in electronic format, but the other half of the image was not on the next screen - it was gone completely! This meant that sometimes the image had been chopped, but usually it meant that the text had been curtailed and was unreadable because so much of it was missing.

Finally, there was a Net Galley reading app format, which normally is acceptable, but with which I've occasionally had problems. In this case, what I got was exactly the same result I got from the epub version: seriously bowdlerized images and text. Both of these books suffered the same problems. I honestly do not know how a publisher can distribute a book in this condition. Did no one think to check?! I imagine these books were designed from the ground up as print books, but we reviewers still need them to be legible in the electronic version!

Normally I like to positively review children's books if they have any redeeming features at all, but this one had zero. Consequently I have no choice but to declare this book warty to the max!

Saturday, September 4, 2021

Raising Backyard Chickens by Emma Nora

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm no more planning on raising chickens in my yard than I was pigs, but just as with that book, I read this one out of curiosity, and I was not disappointed. It's a fun book, full of useful and even unexpected information for anyone planning on producing their own eggs. Of course, you will need a chicken for that; God knows I've tried without one and I've never got it to work!

Don't be put off by the cartoon cover: this is a serious book and contains lots of useful information, along with tips and nested hints, and you won't have to shell out a lot to buy it..... Unfortunately it seems to be available only on Amazon, a corporation I refuse to have anything to do with for a variety of reasons, so I guess the yolk's on me as they say.

The chapters are as follows:

  1. The Basics of Raising Backyard Chickens
  2. The Science of Raising Chickens
  3. Training Your Chickens
  4. All About Eggs
  5. Special mention - Chicks!
  6. Learning to Source the Best Eggs
  7. Maintaining the Pecking Order
  8. Grooming

It oughtn't to be necessary to remind readers that chickens are living and sensitive animals which will require frequent attention along with attendant watering, feeding, and cleaning. They require safe and comfortable housing and close observation for potential health issues. It is not a part time job or to be approached with an amateurish state of mind. It's essential anyone planning on engaging in this pursuit should read a good book on the topic, and preferably more than one, and be prepared to put in the hard work. If you don't, you will have egg on your face....

There are issues you may not have considered if you've been idly thinking about getting a few chickens for the back yard: such as considering local bye-laws and your neighbors, and there are concerns that even were you cocksure about this, you may not have had these make it through the chicken mesh of your mind, such as bullying among chickens, as well as potential problems introducing new birds to an established flock, and so on. If you plan on selling the eggs, or you plan on exhibiting your chickens, there are tips to help you make those plans fly, too. It even teaches you how to pick up chicks - although that might not be exactly what you had in mind....

I personally have no experience raising chickens, so I can give only my opinion, but I'm no dumb cluck, and it seemed to me that this book was competent, serious, appropriate and a great place to start. It felt like it would get a person well on the right path to having success with this project and so I commend it as a worthy read.

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Pigology by Daisy Bird, Camilla Pintonato

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

You eat like a pig. Your place is a pigsty. You're hogging all the limelight. Pigs equal insults in many a mind. This book hopes to set a few records straight and give you a basic grounding in how to choose, own, raise and care for your pig, regardless of what your intentions are. I'm an almost lifelong vegetarian so I would never eat a pig, but I do like the animals. Ignorantly associated with squalor, pigs are not dirty animals - unless they're forced into being so by their human predators. They're also smart - more than dogs even - and among the most intelligent animals in the world.

But they are exploited hugely. Whether your plan is to do that or to have one as a pet, this book will set you up with the basic information you will need to make smart choices and to care for your animal competently. It's laid out according to the following section headings (although there's an introductory section, which for once I did read, that's not included in the content listing for some reason):

  • Bon Appetiti
  • Food All year Round
  • The International Pig
  • Sausageology
  • Everything But the Squeal
  • Pigs and Humans
  • The Mythological Pig
  • Chinese Zodiac
  • Wit and Wisdom
  • Fame!
  • Worth Their Weight in Gold
  • The Perfect Pigsty
  • pigs as Pets
  • A rainbow of Breeds
  • A rainbow of Breeds
  • Vietnamese Potbellied Pig, Odssabaw Island Hog
  • Danish Protest Pig, Meishan
  • Gloucester Old Spot, Large White
  • Black Iberian, Mulefoot

The book is amusing and colorful, with entertaining illustrations and enough information to set you on the right track without being a PhD dissertation. I commend this as a worthy read for anyone wanting to pig out and go hog wild!

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Night Creatures by Rebecca E Hirsch, Sonia Possentini

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the BeeGees song that spent eight weeks at number one in the later seventies, tied to the movie Saturday Night Fever, but reading this I kept finding that lyric in my head, suitably adjusted, of course:

Listen to the ground, there is movement all around
There is something going down, and you can feel it
There are creatures in the air, there are critters everywhere
And it's something you can share, if you believe it
Those denizens of night come with the waning of light
Taking over the world as we sleep
They're hunting and gathering, and spreading through the night
They are Night Creatures, Night Creatures!
They know how to live it!
Night Creatures, Night Creatures!

Of course that song was Night Fever, but now you know happens when I haven't had enough sleep! Gorgeously-illustrated by the elegantly-named Sonia Possentini, and written with panache by Rebecca Hirsch, this book takes a look at some of those living things that populate the evening, night, and early morning, such as bats, bobcats, fireflies, mice, owls, rabbits, raccoons, skunks and others. The book talks a little about each, their favored time to prowl, their diet, and so on. It's makes for an absorbing and educational introduction to a world not many young children are familiar with, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Buzz, Sting, Bite by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson

Rating: WORTHY!

This audiobook, read delightfully by Kristin Milward, is a wonderful overview of the insect world and the importance of all of them - even the annoying ones! Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson is a professor of conservation biology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences located about 10 miles south of Oslo. She writes well, and with a nice sense of humor which isn't lost in the English translation that I listened to.

There are nine main chapters, the title of each being self-explanatory:

  1. Small Creatures, Smart Design: Insect Anatomy
  2. Six Legged Sex: Dating, Mating, Parenting
  3. Eat or be Eaten: Insects in the Food Chain
  4. Insects and Plants: a Never-Ending Race
  5. Busy Flies, Flavorsome Bugs: Insects in Our Food
  6. The Circle of Life - And Death: Insects as Janitors
  7. From Silk to Shellac: Industries of Insects
  8. Lifesavers, Pioneers, and Nobel Prize Winners: Insights From Insects
  9. Insects and us; What's Next?

Here are some quotes directly from the book description - which for once in a rare while is accurate and useful: "Most of us know that we would not have honey without honeybees, but without the pinhead-sized chocolate midge, cocoa flowers would not pollinate. No cocoa, no chocolate." "Blowfly larva can clean difficult wounds; flour beetle larva can digest plastic; several species of insects have been essential to the development of antibiotics." "There are insects that have ears on their knees, eyes on their penises, and tongues under their feet." What's not to love about a book like this?! I commend it heartily.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

It's OK to Need a Friend by Annelies Draws

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I don't know squat about this author except that she (or maybe he!) draws and illustrates a treat, and presents us with a cute chubby Little Brown Bear who happily goes through life being a friend, helping out, and passing on and learning lessons. As the description has it, friendship is both a gift and a skill and this book helps youngsters to discover how to offer the one while picking up the other. I commend this as a worthy read.

It's OK to Make Mistakes by Annelies Draws

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

As the description has it, mistakes give us the power to learn and grow, and as long as we're doing that we're on a winning path. All it takes is a cautious sense of adventure and a willingness to try even if you may fail. I commend this as a worthy read.

The Mole and the Hole by Brayden Kowalczuk

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This was a weird story about a mole who would love to get above ground, but who is hampered from doing so by abundant rocks. Pretty much everything in this story has a face and a motivation, including the rocks, who seem to be conspiring to keep the mole down there with his pet bug. I found it amusing that the mole has a pet.

I also found the story a bit confusing and wondered from time to time if there's a meta story going on here, but in the end it seems to be just a tale of the mole finding a place to live that doesn't have so many rocks. There are no rocks underground in this world, just on the surface, and despite the book description, there seems to be no attempt here to tell any morality tale, so it seems we're supposed to figure that out for ourselves, I guess, or just enjoy the story. It was, as I said, a bit of a mess, but it was nicely illustrated by the author and amusingly told, so I commend this as a worthy read for children.

Olive and Ginger by Xenia Mesot, Vladislav Khristenko, Mariia Khristenko

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Illustrated by the Khristenkos, and written by Xenia Mesot, this book was sweet and fun, and amusing. It has more words than your usual book of this nature and for me that's a good thing. The illustrations are well-done, fun and engaging, and the story is an unusual, but entertaining one. My family used to have a cat named Ginger who was a wild and crazy girl. Ginger here is a boy and the toad is the girl. The two meet and find each other interesting enough to become friends.

The book is divided into three short chapters each on a different topic. The first is of course their meeting, and becoming friends. The curious thing about that is that they don't tell each other their names, and are known throughout simply as Toad and Cat. They discuss their interests, which in Toad's case seem largely to be her fantasies about dragonflies, and in Cat's case seem to be mice. Go figure!

They talk about their love of singing, and have a duet even though each thinks the other's voice could use some training. They discuss hygiene and Cat opines about being shampooed, which leads to an amusing discussion about what purpose it serves and how Cat tried to sabotage the process at one point.

The book was deliciously offbeat and very warming to read, and I commend it completely.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Rating: WORTHY!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though it was rather on the long side and a bit rambling, but it's a topic I enjoy greatly, and an author I love. On top of this, it was read beautifully by Sean Runnette. I'm a big advocate of an author reading their own material, but I understand that there are good reasons why many authors do not. Though this reader isn't Dutch, listening to him reading it so well, it was one of those occasions where, with a slight stretch of the imagination, you can fool yourself into thinking that this is how the author would have read it.

The book rambles a bit and might be somewhat stodgy and overly academic for some, but it was precisely what I was expecting and I had no unpleasant surprises, only a lot of satisfying ones. There were scores of examples of animals' intelligence, with many interesting anecdotes and lots of descriptions of scientific studies which went into enough detail to explain why it was a scientific study and what result it showed, but without belaboring it. The studies have covered all kinds of animals from mollusks to monkeys, birds to apes, fish to elephants, and a variety of others.

The book explains how these studies differ and what they show, and how one study can or cannot be made to work with another species for an assortment of reasons. While it was thorough, I was never bored, and felt no need to skip a page or two. We learn how studies have changed along with our view of society and why older views as to the limitations of animal cognition are invalid, so it's as much a measure of change in human cognition as it is in measuring animal cognition, which is quite intriguing.

I whole-heartedly commend this as a worthy read.

Monday, February 1, 2021

Gopher Golf by Karl Beckstrand, Jordan C Brun

Rating: WARTY!

I was curious about this book which is the third in a series of picture-only books. I have not read either of the other two, but I suspect these will appeal more to very young children than to anyone older, because to me it made little sense and wasn't really as easy to follow as I'd expected it to be - in the sense of knowing exactly what was going on.

The illustrations were very cute, and I liked the frenetic tone to the images, but there really wasn't a story in the way I'm used to following one. It was more like a middle with no beginning or end. Maybe for little kids this doesn't matter so much, but then I'm forced to ask: if there's essentially no story - or certainly no written story, when why is there an 'author'?!

An illustrator, or artist or however you care to describe Brun, makes sense, but I'm at a lost to see exactly what Beckstrand contributed except in the vaguest of general ideas. And yet he gets first billing over Brun! But that's a pet peeve of mine: I always feel the artist in books - children's books, comic books, whatever, deserves top billing for the work they put in, but the writer always gets that. It just seems wrong to me!

But I digress. I can't commend this as a worthy read not because there is literally nothing to read, but because it was just a shotgun blast of confusion. I've followed and enjoyed word-free books before, so it's not the format or style that turned me off. This one seemed neither a story nor a book, and certainly not a story book.