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.
