Author: Richard E. Albert (no website)
Publisher: Chronicle
Rating: WORTHY!
Brilliantly illustrated by Sylvia Long.
This was on sale at Amazon and looked interesting. Unfortunately, when I got it onto my phone, I couldn't read it because the text was too small! Even on my son's MacBook Air, which has a screen about the size of an iPad, it was barely legible. I do not recommend buying the ebook version of this unless you plan on reading it on your desktop with a 17" monitor! I don't know what the publishers were thinking, putting this out like this in ebook form.
On the other hand, the artwork was amazing, and I'd recommend buying it just for that. Sylvia Long did a first class job.
The story is very simple, and highly improbable, but was still an entertaining one for kids. It had a good (if in this case rather misguided) message. Set in the American southwest desert, this tells the story of Alejandro, and old man living alone with just his donkey for companionship. He has his home, his well, the windmill which pumps water from the well, and little else. Visitors are rare.
One day Alejandro decides to plant a small garden to grow vegetables, and he discovers that some desert animals are stopping by to drink from the troughs where he runs the water for the plants. He decides to create a small oasis for them all.
Rather than a guide for rescuing desert animals which clearly do not need our help, since they do a lot better than we do in those conditions, it's much more rewarding to view this as simple a guide to the amazing and wonderful creatures which manage to thrive in such arid environments. They could teach the rest of us a heck of a lot about water conservation! In the back of this book, there's a brief guide to some of the animals which show up at Alejandro's well, which is rather interesting - if you can read the tiny font!
In conclusion, I recommend this for the artwork and for introducing children to desert life, but I don't recommend the ebook version unless you can read it on your wall-sized TV screen - where it actually might look really cool.
