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

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Orangutan by Rita Goldner


Rating: WORTHY!

I really like this book. It's very colorful and well-researched. It's not only telling a plausible and non-anthropomorphized story of a day in the life of a young Orangutan, it's also imparting facts about the life the animal leads. The animal is cute and sure to invoke feelings of kinship and protectiveness, and the story is neither too short nor too long. And what a great name for an author writing about an bright orange animal: Goldner! LOL!

One thing that I particularly liked is that the text, though small, is readily readable because if you put your thumb and forefinger together on top of the text and slide them apart, a plain text-box appears with the same text in a large font. You can also call it up by lightly tapping it twice with a finger. You remove the pop-up box with the same motion. This works for the story and the "Fun Fact" section which is on each page. it works on the iPad and on a smart phone, which is really nice since the text is really small there. Adding a voice reading the text (preferably by the author!) would be an improvement, but I was pleased with this as is. It's a great little book for youngsters and I recommend it.


Sunday, August 7, 2016

Little Tails in the Jungle by Frédéric Brrémaud, Federico Bertolucci


Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Yes, you read that right - it's tails, not tales! I liked that! I've been largely a fan of the Brrémaud/Bertolucci graphic novel series titled 'Love', a text-free set of stories about life in the wild. I was disappointed with volume three, but I really liked the first two volumes. It makes me happy, therefore, to report another win for them with this volume aimed at educating children about life on various continents.

Chipper and Squizzo are two little animal characters who take trips in their cardboard box airplane (something young children can readily emulate with any old cardboard box you have lying around). This part of the story is line drawings with a splash of monochrome color; it's refreshingly simple and will probably appeal to young readers, especially when its contrasted against the gorgeous full color images of the various animals they encounter.

As usual with this kind of children's book, I'm sorry to report that the animals featured are biased toward mammals, and largely situated on land (we humans are a very class conscious society aren't we, even when it comes down to biological classes!), but I'm happy to report we don't see exclusively those things. There does appear the occasional gastropod, arachnid, and other classes such as fish, bird, and reptile are represented. They writers even get the piranhas situated on the right continent this time - something I complained about in my review of the first volume of Love! Here I'd argue that the 'parrot' Chipper and Squizzo saw was actually a macaw, but that's just me being picky!

But I'm not going to let that get in the way of praising this as a charming and educational book. There's a couple (I'd have liked more) of pages at the end that give some detailed information about some of the animals featured - again heavily biased toward mammals, but it's better than nothing. Overall I recommend this as a worthy read for children.


Thursday, July 28, 2016

Aquila the Eagle by Yaa Asabea Boafo, Dennis Owusu-Ansaa


Rating: WARTY!

Note this was an advance review copy obtained from Net Galley for which I thank the publisher!

There are some amazing names here. It's copyrighted to Miriam P Boafo, and nicely illustrated by Dennis Owusu-Ansaa, and this book is for young children. It follows a small family of bald eagles. Dad is described with a pronoun which has an initial cap ("Himself") like this male eagle is a god, but it's his wife who is doing all the work in laying the egg! An eagle egg is about three inches long. That's some size to have to deal with!

The story is accurate in that eagles do mate for life, and they build huge nests over time, so the one depicted here is a starter kit, evidently. Young Aquila appears when snow is still on the ground, and the impression we get is that this story will follow his adventures, but in the end, it was nothing more than a prologue, and I was disappointed in it. Other than the eagle being born and our meeting the two children, nothing happens in over thirty pages!

I first looked at this on my phone, and I have to say that is not the best medium for reading this! The images are oddly broken-up and the text is badly formatted. Viewed in Adobe Digital Editions on a desktop computer, it looked much, much better, and displayed the artwork to full advantage. I haven't seen a print version or been able to look at it on my iPad yet (Net Galley was down when I tried to download to the tablet), but I imagine it will look good there.

The eagles, I have to say, are very anthropomorphized. This will work for young children, but it's rather misleading. Eagles, aside from their lifelong pairing, are solitary. By that, I mean that they don't flock, yet there is a gathering depicted here, and young Aquila is declared special by a matronly wise-old eagle. This story has a religious agenda, and Aquila is evidently some sort of Messianic figure. Eagles can live for half a century, but young Aquila is just beginning his life. He has golden down, which is unusual, and is eating all his food. He's going to grow strong. Meanwhile, we meet Benji and the oddly-named Faithlyn, playing in their house because of the snow and cold outside (eagles nest very early in the year). They see an eagle, a grown one, but do not meet any, so the cover illustration is very misleading.

So my main problem was that the story really isn't a story; it's an introduction, and introductions and prologues are the very thing I routinely skip when reading a book, because they rarely deliver anything that's worth the time spent in reading them. Another problem I had with this is that mom is shown in a traditional role in the kitchen. There's nothing wrong with being a traditional mom, but it's depicted so often in children's books that it amounts to brainwashing girls: you are hereby found guilty of womanhood! You are sentenced to life in the kitchen without the possibility of parole! I wish writers and artists would allow girls to decide for themselves what they will do with their life. Instead, just like the eagles, they're imaged and imagined as fulfilling no role other than one traditionally set in stone - or in this case, in the kitchen - and this when we're about to elected the USA's first female president! We need to ditch that paradigm - or at least show dad in that same role just as often. No dad is in evidence here, other than Aquila's dad, BTW.

Given these issues, I really cannot recommend it in good faith. I wish the writer success in her endeavor, but it's not one with which I can get on board.


Monday, July 25, 2016

Puppy Steps by Libby Rockaway


Rating: WORTHY!

I found this to be a cool title from an author with an amazing name! How cool is 'Rockaway'? Yeah! The book is intended as a practical guide to raising a dog to be well-behaved and sociably-adjusted, and from the start it was obvious this was not only written competently, but also well intelligently thought-out. This girl knows what she's doing. I'm not a dog owner at present, but I have owned and known many dogs and I've never been a fan of the training-your-pet-as-a-circus-dog, but that's not what this is about. It's about building a relationship with your pet so that you both maximize your comfort and fun, and become true companions, not over-bearing master and timid slave. It's about raising a healthy and emotionally well-balanced pet who heeds you without you having to get heavy-handed, domineering, or frustrated.

The book is replete with lists and charts, hints and tips, and is set out in a smart and orderly fashion,. It features step-by-step instructions towards the end of the book, on how to achieve specific goals. This is where the 'Puppy Steps' title was so great. The steps start small, when your pet is young, and they don't demand too much of you or your dog - except in that you need to stay with the program or you're not going to get results.

Note that this involves spending a lot of time with your pet, especially in the early stages. But then why get a pet if you're not going to spend lots of time with it? This kind of training cannot be done with a five minute session here and there; it does need time and work on a daily basis. I like the way the author maintains a positive attitude and a good sense of humor, and explains things in easy-to-grasp way without being condescending or talking down to the reader. I'm a visual person - I often grasp things better when I can see it being done and have notes to fall back on than I do with only written instructions, and we're covered there, too: the author has several videos on YouTube.

The thing I liked most about this is the emphasis on positive reinforcement, which is not always what you might think. It's not just a matter of having the dog do something and rewarding it. Sometimes the rewards come when the dog is doing nothing, but is nonetheless behaving and doing what you would wish them to, such as staying out from under your feet. It's also not a matter of leaping from no behavior to good behavior. You have to take the puppy steps and do them in the right way so your dog gets a clear and positive message. I like the way the training is about having fun with your pet and making sure your puppy also has fun. You're working with the animal, not against it. You can take shortcuts to good behavior when you're using the animal's own behaviors and instincts to get messages across about what you expect.

I liked this book. I liked that it made sense, that it was clear, instructive and well-written. Obviously I haven't tested out these guidelines with a puppy of my own, so I can't say this worked for me, but to me the training makes good sense, and I think this book does too, if you and your puppy are going to grow to get along with each other! The You Tube videos are evidence enough for me, and I recommend this book as a worthy read and a useful tool for dog owners.


Thursday, July 14, 2016

A Night at the Animal Shelter by Mark J Asher


Rating: WORTHY!

This is a short and thoroughly adorable novelette which frankly brought a little lump to my throat by the ending. I'm not kidding. I've worked at a vet's office as an assistant caregiver, so I understand how it goes. It's not the same, of course, as the questionably named 'animal shelter' by any means, but I get the idea so I could relate.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I bought this, thinking maybe it was a young children's picture book, but it's not - it's all text all the time, and it can be a young children's book or a fully mature adult's book. It begins with the humans settling the animals down for the night - on Christmas Eve. Once they're left, the animals start talking to each other and it was at this point that I wondered if I could really read this, but the conversations are interesting, and not over-done, not sappy or dumb, and there's a nice thread of humor.

Of course this isn't just any Christmas Eve, and the animals have a few innocent adventures to get under way before the big day dawns. I loved the story, I loved how it was written, and I dearly loved the ending. I recommend this one completely.


The Zebra Said Shhh by MR Nelson, Tamia Sheldon


Rating: WORTHY!

Well, it's time once again to review some children's literature! I have two wonderful ones for you. This is a beautifully illustrated young children's book aimed (and good luck with that!) at getting your young 'un off to sleep at night! I actually think this has a good chance of succeeding because it has a mantra-like, almost hypnotic cadence as the zebra finds himself, stripe me, having to shush, in turn, all the other animals in the zoo which, apart from one reptile and one bird, seems to be exclusively devoted to mammals.

So once he's talked in turn to those pesky monkeys (and you know what those guys are like after they get high on peanuts!), risked hurting the lion's pride, repeated himself to the parrot, asked the tortoises to slow down for the day, managed, at a stretch, to convince the giraffe, and on and on, suddenly, everything seems remarkably quiet. Hmm!

I liked this story and adored the images, and the book works well even on a smart phone in the crappy Kindle app, FYI. They look awesome on the iPad in landscape mode, even in the crappy Kindle app. I think Nelson and Sheldon are a team to be reckoned with. Assuming they continue to get a good night's sleep. Shhh!


Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Our Amazing World: Dinosaurs by Kay de Silva


Rating: WORTHY!

I reviewed another book by Kay da Silva back in April, 2016. That one was about sea turtles.

This is a children's introduction to dinosaurs and has photographs of fossils and computer-rendered pictures of dinosaurs in their natural environment. I was able to read this on a smart phone with no problems, although you really want a bigger screen to really see the pictures. You can enlarge the pictures on the phone screen, but frankly, and unlike the claws of Deinonychus, they were not very sharp! This probably won't bother young kids as much as it did me!

The real value of the book is in the details it gives. The author really goes into dinosaurs and their life and habits; not so much that a child would get lost or overwhelmed, but more than you would typically find in a book like this one. The images are not all the typical favorites, either. Yes, Tyrannosaurus puts in an appearance, but we also see Tarbosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Albertaceratops (which looks like it's having a bad horn day), Yangchuanosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Elasmosaurus (which wasn't actually a dinosaur!), Kentrosaurus, Peteinosaurus (again, not actually a dinosaur), Plateosaurus, and a host of others, in addition to photographs of footprints, eggs, and skeletons, all supported in the text.

If your kids love dinosaurs (and friends) then this is definitely something you should consider adding to their collection.


Monday, May 9, 2016

Love Volume 3: The Lion by Frédéric Brrémaud, Federico Bertolucci


Rating: WARTY!

(Note that this was an advance review copy)

I've been following this series since it began, and after the first two volumes (The Tiger and The Fox, I found I didn't like this third one. The art work was poor in comparison with the previous two volumes (although decent by your average run-of-the-mill comic books standards) and the story was nothing but one long run of violent and bloody encounters between lions and their prey, and between lions and other lions.

It was not interesting to me, and there really was very little respite from it, especially given that the art work offered nothign truly appealing to look forward to. This doesn't accurately even reflect the life of a lion, which is actually much more along the lines of lying around all day, day after day, and once in a while going on a hunt, and of course, once in a while mating and defending territory. It's really pretty boring, and why people think lions are majestic and kings of the jungle is a complete mystery to me.

On a technical note, I had a problem with this advance review copy on the iPad in Bluefire reader - it would not open at all and locked-up the app! I was able to open and read it on Adobe Digital Editions on my desktop computer. I think this had the potential to tell a really engaging story, but somewhere the lions lost the scent and meandered off. I can't recommend it.


Thursday, May 5, 2016

Orange Animals on the Planet from Speedy Publishing


Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not sure about the idea of an authorless book, since no author is named here, or about a publisher named 'Speedy', but I think this is the second children's book from this publisher I've reviewed and they're not at all bad. This one was quite dramatic: "on the planet"?! But orange animals are often dramatic, although the definition of orange is stretched somewhat here. Flamingos put in an appearance at one point, for example. I guess pink is the new orange! LOL!

That said, the book is very colorful and informative - a bit of information here and there - just enough for growing minds, and some really engaging photographs of the various animals. What was most impressive to me was the unusually wide range that's covered here. Typically a children's animal picture book favors mammals - the cuddly ones, even if cuddly when used there is stretched a bit to include lions and tigers and bears, oh my! It was nice to see a wider world here, with representatives of all five vertebrate classes featured: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There were also insects and arachnids, so kudos for that. It's important for children to learn how varied life is, and how important it is that we protect that variety.

We get to meet the clownfish (a mated pair here, evidently). What we don't learn is that Pixar's view of Clownfish life was biased in that typically, when the female dies, the male spontaneously goes transgender and becomes the new dominant female! Nemo could never have had his dad chasing him across the ocean after mom died! Not that a parent fish chases its offspring across the ocean! If it had, it's far more likely to have been the mom clownfish, but I digress. We also get to see and learn about the Andean cock-of-the-rock, the tiger, the Julia butterfly, the Baboon spider, orangutans, spider crabs, river hogs, newts, corn snakes and so on. It's a lot of orange. Note also that weights and measures in this book are in metric, not the lone hold-out USA system.

I liked this book. It's bold and straight-forward, varied and colorful, and educational. You can't ask for more in a children's book.


Sunday, April 24, 2016

If Bees Are Few by Various Writers


Rating: WORTHY!

I have to say up front that I am not a big fan of poetry. Too much of it seems way too pretentious to me, but I am a big fan of bees. The aim of this book was to bring together "a hive of bee poems", with the profits from it going to the University of Minnesota Bee Lab. So, if you don't want to read the book, at least consider sending some money to the lab! Maybe they'll send you a free beard of bees!

No, they won't - the bees would just die without the queen, and if they included a queen, she would probably die from being so exposed! This is how vulnerable bees are, and whatever is causing Colony Collapse Disorder isn't helping. If the bees go, we're screwed for a host of food plants, and gorgeous flowers and trees which we can only enjoy if the bees pollinate them. Besides, bees are cute!

CCD has affected a lot of nations: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA, to name a few. Unfortunately these nations are not all well represented in this book! France, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland have no representation as far as I can tell, and continents like South America and Africa not at all or hardly at all. There seems to be a strong focus on Minnesota (about 20% of the writers are from there or live there), and around 80% of the writers are from or resident in the USA. That said, there is some representation from a wide variety of nations, if only to the tune of one or two writers each.

The title, If Bees are Few comes from Emily Dickinson's 1755 poem To Make a Prairie, and though I am not a fan of hers, her poems were nonetheless among the best here. There is a preface and an introduction which I skipped. I never read those things, but I did read the afterword by Marla Spivak which talked about the whole purpose of the book. She's well-worth listening to.

The poems are from people both living and not, and there were some sterling names among those who have gone to that great beehive in the sky: Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Devereaux, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, DH Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, and William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, Vergil, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats. Let's face it, whether you're a fan of poetry or not, these contributors are no lightweights! The variety of poetry is remarkable. Some are long, some short, some are like traditional poems, some not, and some are more like short stories than poems. Some are serious, some amusing, some descriptive, some truly poetic, if not obscure! Some are solely about bees, others have bees make cameos, just buzzing in and out. There is something for everyone, though, which I really liked.

I found myself preferring the older poems but there were some more recent ones that had a good voice, too. All in all, it made for an entertaining read even for someone like me. And it's for a really good cause. It's for all of these reasons that I recommend this book.




Monday, April 4, 2016

Sea Turtles by Kay de Silva


Rating: WORTHY!

Who doesn't like turtles? This brilliant color story for young children goes under the ocean to look at sea turtles, and with the glorious photographs, we're right there with the divers. But it's not only gorgeous pictures! It's also an education as to how these turtles are built 9strongly!), how they live (peacefully!) and what they get up to (travel and food!). Most of their time it seems, from the pictures, is spent on vacation in warm holiday resorts! I am envious!

On the other hand there's a lot of travel involved. It's a lonely life, and unlike me when I commute, they don't get to listen to audio books! What goes on in their turtle minds as they swim thousands of miles? Plus if you're a turtle you have to eat sponges which, while I am sure is very absorbing, is not my favorite food! Other turtles eat jellyfish, which sounds tempting, but I'm guessing it doesn't really taste like Jell-O! Note that green turtles get their name not from their color (which isn't always green), but from the fact that they eat greens! Healthy little critters!

Then there's that laborious trek over the sand to lay eggs. I don't know about you but I dislike the sand sticking all over me after I come out of the ocean, but the turtles don't seem to mind being coated in it. Turtles are tough. They have to be to survive that mad dash over the sand after hatching, with predators on the look-out for them. No wonder they are survivors and live so long: eighty to a hundred years!

This book, part of 'an amazing world' series, was a joy: very informative, readable on a smart phone, and it talked about different species and was fill of information in small bite-sized pieces that kids can remember. I recommend it.


Tuesday, December 29, 2015

The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting


Rating: WARTY!

While I've seen the Dolittle movies (both the Rex Harrison version, and the Eddie Murphy version) I've never read any of the books. You could argue that I still haven't since the one I review here is a Dalmatian Children's Classic (so-called), and as such is a condensed version (adapted by Kathryn R Knight) illustrated (by Nick Price) with many line drawings in which Dolittle is very much drawn in the mold of WC Fields!

As with many older books, there have been complaints of racism inherent in the book's pages, which I find rather disingenuous when applied retroactively. Yes, there are old books which are racist by today's standards, and the Dolittle books are among them. There are even old books (Mein Kampf comes to mind) which are racist by their own contemporary standards. I can't really speak to that since the version I read was an adaptation which has been washed clean of the original racism. I also find it interesting that Eddie Murphy agreed to act in this role given the book's history! Maybe they were aiming for some sort of redemption by making Dolittle black?

I have read various commentaries on this topic. It isn't a defense to say that this book isn't racist by its own contemporary standards. The original of this novel was racist by any standards. Is it a defense to say it isn't maliciously racist? By that i mean did it actively intend harm through the racism it contained? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it wasn't harmful. In this version, the racism has been bleached (yes, that is a reference to the original!), but I think as long as I'm mentioning this, it's only fare to also mention that Lofting wrote other books in this series condemning of slavery, and that even in this book, he depicts an African king who is pissed-off with white men because of their depredations of his nation's natural resources. To me, this goes a little way towards mitigating against charges of overt or active, or outright malicious racism. That does not make the book lily white, so to speak.

My biggest complaint about this particular version of the novel isn't about racism or the fact that the doctor speaks to the animals or they to him - it's children's fantasy after all! - but that the author doesn't have a clue about animals. Hugh Lofting was a soldier (he originated the idea for these stories in the trenches in France in World War One), not a veterinarian or a biologist, but even so, it would not have taken much effort, even in 1920, to look up a little bit about Africa to discover that it isn't home to Orang-utans. Nor would it have taken much more effort to discover that gorillas, orang-utans, and chimpanzees are apes, and not monkeys, and eagles are not commonly found out on the open ocean! It was that kind of thing which annoyed me more than anything else, so for me, the story was sadly lacking in a decent foundation.

Given the premise - a doctor discovers he has more affinity with animals than with humans, and can understand them and therefore treat them expertly - it seems to me that a golden opportunity was wasted here to teach children something about animals, biology and evolution. The novel may well be be moderately entertaining for very young children who question little, but for my money (and note that the book is available free online) it really wasn't a worthy read at all (I skipped a lot of the second half), not when there are more modern and better written novels with these themes - animals and adventure. Besides, this novel is out of copyright now, and neither Hugh Lofting (who died in 1947) nor his estate are going to get anything for it if you buy it! Whether oyu think he ever deserved anything for it is up to you! Maybe it's time for someone to rewrite this in an intelligent, educational, and non-racist way?


Monday, December 21, 2015

Bubba the Bulldog Tries to Smile by Bree Clausen


Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a fan of bulldogs. They're quite literally deformed little dogs, but this story really has little to do with them. Real ones, anyway! Bubba the Bulldog is in a sorry state: he doesn’t seem to know how to smile! His best friend Ryan the Human smiles miles of smiles all the while. Apparently Bubba suffers from heavy lip syndrome! He just can’t lift ‘em! One day Ryan came home with his leg in a cast. Skateboarding was going to be out for a while. So was smiling, it seemed. No matter what Bubba did, Ryan could not seem to lift his lips any more than Bubba could his own.

Ryan would never tape up his dog’s lips to make him smile, but when Bubba got wrapped up in tape all by himself, his mouth did seem to be sporting a smirk, but it would take something truly odd which Bubba found inexplicably under Ryan’s bed to bring a really toothy grin to his face. I wonder what it was he found?

I liked this story because it was fun, and absurd, and the colorful drawings were highly amusing. For all I know, this might even be based on a true story! I recommend it.

I Love my Dog by David Chuka


Rating: WARTY!

From the auhtor of such literary efforts as Billy and the Monster who Loved to Fart and Billy and Monster: The Superhero with Fart Powers comes yet another disaster: a book about dogs (and yes, there are fart jokes in this book). Two kids, boy and girl, are excited to go find their first pet dog, but never once is the animal pound considered. All the dogs featured here are so-called "pure bred". The first dog is an Alaskan Malamute, and though the story is initially narrated by the sister, when we meet the dog, it describes its own role, but it says, "Do you know man still uses me as a sled dog...." I think a gender -neutral word would have been better, as in "Do you know that people still use me as a sled dog...." There's no reason at all to imply that only men can do this. Not in a year when we're newly celebrating the fact that the US finally wised-up and let women have their run of the army!

We also meet a Schnauzer (and yes, the name does come from snout, but it refers to the dog looking like it has a moustache!), an old English Sheepdog, a Poodle (the second most intelligent breed of dog, believe it or not), Dalmatian, Collie, Greyhound, Dachshund, Cocker Spaniel, Great Dane, Saint Bernard, Golden Retriever, and several others.

We learn only a very small amount about each dog, and while we do learn a bit about the down side of dog ownership, we don't learn anything, really, about what is potentially the most important thing about these 'pure bred' dogs, which is that inbreeding leads to awful deficits in too many of these animals. These problems range from, for example, deafness and hyperuricemia in the Dalmatian, to heart disease in the Boxer, to hip dysplasia in the German shepherd, to breathing problems in bulldogs, and other issues, such as mitral valve disease in the King Charles Spaniel (although this dog is not featured in this book).

I would have preferred a book that mentioned the options available and talked more about how much care, attention, and outright love a pet needs, as well as what it costs in buying the dog in the first place, and then in ongoing outlay for food, toys, bedding, and vet bills for routine visits alone. I can't recommend this book because it lacks far too much important information and kids deserve so much better.


Saturday, December 19, 2015

Luna the Night Butterfly by Lily Lexington


Rating: WORTHY!

Luna has issues. She's glowing luminous green to begin with, which is a problem, because she's a night "butterfly" and those nighttime predators are pretty skillful. Fortunately, she meets none in this poetic paean to positivity and perseverance (and don't try saying that too fast unless you cover your mouth!). Luna's kinda cute actually, despite having two legs and four arms, but you know what they say - four armed is forewarned. Maybe I got that wrong. Never mind.

Poetry is only one pleasing part of the picture (there I go again! Sometimes you just have to pee....). The images are gorgeous. Colorful (yes, even the night-time ones) and wonderfully rendered. Luna actually doesn't realize that she's a Luna Moth, but when she finds out, she adapts admirably and ably. She's absolutely awesome! I give her an 'A'!


Which is My Way Home? by John G Pedicini


Rating: WORTHY!

This was a fun children’s book: seagull vs coyotes featuring snail and puppy! What’s not to like? Note that the coyote encounter was a bit scary, and the images for that encounter are suitably dark, so really young children might not appreciate it.

The story is that a young seagull loses his home on an iceberg and is chased by a polar bear. If I had a penny for every time that;s happened to me. We can conclude from all this that these events took place at the north pole. Somehow this little seagull seems to rub everyone up the wrong way and ends up shunned, even by other seagulls. Finally there’s some rest to be had in a forest, which is just as well since it’s dark already. This is hardly the natural habitat of a gull, and there are many new and scary things, not least of which are the hungry coyotes. They’re always hungry, the predators, in these stories, aren’t they?!

Well it turns out that the gull is not the only lost soul in the forest that night. There's a puppy and some young children, and working together, the avian, the mammal, and the gastropod manage to make it through, and bring the children to safety. A fun, scary and unusual adventure told in poetry. I liked it!


Monday, December 14, 2015

Animals That Make Me Say Ewww! by Dawn Cusick


Rating: WORTHY!

This was a cute way to get children interested in learning about nature. I recommend it on that basis although I had an issue or two with it. One issue was a question of wording. On page 13 I read, "help them smell better" and I felt, in order to be clear, it should have read, "help them to detect smells better", or something to that effect! A minor point but worth attention. Other than that it was written well, but personally, I would have liked it better if it had said a word or two about endangered species given that it featured one or two, such as the gorilla. The attraction for kids is based on the gross-out factor, obviously, but since I knew this going in, I had no problem with it. There are other books in a series based on other perspectives, to round-out the picture, such as Get the Scoop on Animal Poop, Bug Butts, Animal Tongues, Animal Eggs: An Amazing Clutch of Mysteries and Marvels, Get the Scoop on Animal Puke!, and Animals That Make Me Say Wow!, none of which I've read.

The novel covers a variety of animals, but is focused strongly on mammals, and often the larger or better known ones at that. This is a bit class-ist, but it's not all mammals, by any means. There is the occasional insect or two, a fish here and there, a spider (my favorite spider, too!), and an amphibian or two, and quite a few birds, so there is variety, and for me, if you can get kids through that potentially difficult door of initial interest with the cuddly ones, that goes a long way to keeping them interested and helping to wise them up to other less adorable animals, and to what we're doing to the world, and how much we have to lose if we don't all wise up! Hopefully they will realize that not all animals are furry and relatively closely related to us. There's a huge variety out there, and maybe they will realize they can find 'eww' locally, too, if they're willing to keep their eyes open and away from their video games for a while! They don't need to travel to exotic locations.

My biggest problem was with technical issues. This is an advance review copy, so hopefully these will be worked out before the final copy is published, but just FYI, there were, for me, two main problems. The first was that many words were missing the letter 'r'. I have no idea what that was all about because it wasn't every 'r' which was missing - just some! For example, on p12 'bird beak' was missing an 'r' - it has a space instead. The same thing happens on p22. The same with kangaroo on p27, with flower on p35, with bird and fur on p39, with strong on p47, sources p51, 'Fly swatted and directions' on p55, 'upward and figure' on p58, 'are' on p59, 'Fight-or-flight and response' on p62. Also one 'f' in buffalo is missing on p77. Just the one!

This problem was apparent my iPad both in the Bluefire reader version, and in the kindle app version (I wouldn't recommend trying to read this book on a smart phone!). The Kindle app also screwed-up the placement of the pictures. Many of the pictures are evidently seated on a blue-green colored background, but in the Kindle app they were missing this completely and were all over the place and appeared in a variety of sizes! Bluefire Reader did not have this problem. Also some of the larger text was a bit blurry on the Kindle app (but not in Bluefire). Again, this may have been because this was an ARC or it may be because Amazon produced a crappy Kindle app.

Those problems had nothing to do with the idea or the writing, so I'm not worried about them! I consider this a worthy read and I recommend it.


Thursday, November 12, 2015

Tovi the Penguin Goes Away for Christmas by Janina Rossiter


Rating: WORTHY!

I've had a mixed relationship with Tovi, but who can resist a good Christmas story? This one was a good one - and had a nice message - that friends are more important than presents, although presents are good too! Tovi and his two friends are evidently quite well-off, because they have a winter retreat they can visit for Xmas. I guess they have a nice income from licensing their image to the Linux people and the Batman franchise...!

The penguins discover on Xmas morning that Santa hasn't delivered any presents! Rather than dissolve into blubbering and inertia, they press on and make a joyous dinner, and play games and have a good old time. When they arrive home, they discover that Santa has indeed paid them a visit - he just didn't know they were away from home. Not only did they have a great time, now they get to open presents. I found this to be a fun story, and with an important message, which is why I'm rating this one a worthy read.


The Awkward Owl by Shawnda Blake


Rating: WORTHY!

Awkward is itself an awkward word with the 'wkw' - I mean how weird is that? The owl was really a turkey vulture (it was all a misunderstanding), but this story isn't awkward at all; it's charming, and it is about an owl - a young one who-who hasn't yet got full control of his faculties. He flies backwards and upside down and bumps into trees while other owls swoop and flutter on silent but deadly wings.

Fortunately there's a little girl who is understanding (and sadly nameless), not critical or fun-poking, and she helps the owl until he can grow a little more and not be the Jar Jar Binks of the owl world. I found the drawings in this story to be a hoot! The tale was amusingly sweet, ruffled no feathers, and was gentle and easy, and full of promise. I recommend this one because it dared to be inventive and different.


Sunday, November 8, 2015

Ape House by Sara Gruen


Rating: WARTY!

Read a bit tediously by Paul Boehmer, this novel focuses on bonobos, a great ape species which is very similar to chimpanzees in many ways, very different in others. All of the major great ape species have been taught to communicate in American Sign Language, from Koko the gorilla, to Kanzi the Bonobo, to Chantek the Orangutan. Apes are not the only species with which we’ve communicated. These studies cross a wide range. There are not only chimpanzees, but also elephants, dolphins, and parrots, and dolphins. Although there is controversy around these studies, and even around the study directors, it’s definitely fair to say that animals are way more complex than most humans have typically been willing to credit, and some of them have very advanced intelligence, experiencing emotions as humans do.

In the novel, fictional character Isabel Duncan works with Bonobos and language. She becomes the subject of a newspaper story researched by John Thigpen and two other people from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who visit her one New Year's Day to discuss the Bonobos she works with: Bonzi, Jelani, Lola, Makena, Mbongo , and Sam. Boehmer reads these oddly, and I can’t be sure if this is how the author told him they were pronounced, or if he's making it up and getting it wrong. He pronounces Bonzi as Bon-Zee rather than as Bonsy, and Mbongo as Muh-bongo rather than Um-bongo.

It would be nice to know how they’re supposed to be pronounced and an audio book is the perfect way to do this. Print books and ebooks fail in this regard unless they have a pronunciation guide. It would have also been nice to know what the more obscure names meant, too. All names used to actually mean something, and we’ve lost that. Now people pick names for how they sound, or to honor a relative or a celebrity rather than for how they apply to the child and what they mean. When I come up with character names, I really give some thought to how they should portray the character, and in some books, the names are clues to the characters character or fate - if you can only figure them out! I had particular fun with this in Saurus, one of my favorites.

This story really takes off when there's an explosion at the lab, and the apes end up in a reality TV show. Isabel discovers that in order to fix this, she has to find a way to connect better with humans - something she's not very skilled at. This fictional character seems to be based loosely on the real life, controversial ape language researcher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. One of the interesting things about these studies, and about great ape research in the wild, is that the big names associated with it always seem to be female. The three best-known names in great ape studies in the wild were women tasked by Louis Leakey to study these apes in the hope that it would throw light on early hominid development, and it has, but these women were also controversial. The best known of them is probably Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, but almost equally well known was Dian Fossey who studied gorillas and was murdered by gorilla poachers. Much less well known is Birute Galdikas who studied orangutans. The books these three wrote are well-worth reading, as is Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal if you want to learn more.

The author, Sara Gruen, studied American Sign language and the symbolic lexigram language the apes use so that she could better understand the bonobos she visited at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa. This is where Kanzi lives. Clearly the author may be writing fiction, even fanciful fiction, but it is grounded in her own personal experiences with real apes. My problem with her writing, however, had to do with how the university responded to the bombing of the lab. It was like they couldn't wash their hands of the apes and of Isabel fast enough, and this seemed completely unrealistic to me. They were, in effect, siding with the terrorists. Never once did they try to correct the insane mis-perception of the purpose of the "lab" - which was language studies, not animal experimentation.

You would think they would be very much concerned about putting their best face before the public, and they didn’t even have to lie about it, yet they failed on an epic level. Never once did they consult with Isabel about the apes' future. I get that the university effectively owned the apes and it was their decision, but I find it hard to believe that any university worth its name would behave so callously and precipitously. I also get that this is a dramatic fiction, but it seemed to me that there were better ways to set this up than to make the university leadership look like spineless jerks. Maybe the author hates universities!

The lot was plodding and predictable, but the worst fail for me, however, was the fact that The main story - about the apes - was repeatedly sidelined by a boring domestic trivia story going on between the other main character, John Thigpen, and his wife Amanda. I could see the author desperately wanted to get John and Isabel together, but why? Why not just make John single? Why include John at all, and thereby make Isabel merely another maiden-in-distress, needing to be rescued by Saint John, a knight in shining armor? It made no sense to me to take the drama away from the apes, and it was yet another insult by a female writer to a female main character.

From a purely narrative PoV, it was really annoying to have to abandon the main story to go off into this boring drama over whether this couple would stay together or over Amanda's and John's spinelessness when confronted with Amanda's domineering and interfering mother. It didn’t even instill any confidence in me that an invertebrate like John could be a heroic man of action when he was such a wallflower, or that he was even heroic at all if he was going to abandon his wife at he drop of an ape. Maybe I got his wrong - as I said, I didn't finish this novel, so maybe it panned out differently; however, it felt like the road most traveled and that's the road least interesting to me, but it was this negation of both Isabel and the apes which was what truly killed this story. I could not finish it, and I cannot recommend it based on what I heard. I haven'tread anything else by this author and now I have no intention of doing so.