Creature Features: 25 Animals Explain Why They Look the Way They Do by Steve Jenkins (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Creature Features: 25 Animals Explain Why They Look the Way They Do by Steve Jenkins Deborah Stevenson Jenkins, Steve Creature Features: 25 Animals Explain Why They Look the Way They Do; written by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page; illus. by Steve Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 32p ISBN 978-0-544-23351-5 $17.99 R Gr. 2–4 Estimable natural historian Jenkins turns here to a Q&A format in this gallery of unusual animal features. Each page offers a question (“Dear Egyptian vulture: Why no feathers on your face?”), an answer (“Are you sure you want to know? . . . I stick my face into the bodies of the dead animals I eat, and feathers would get pretty messy”), and a full-face portrait with emphasis on the feature in question. Characteristics discussed are generally intriguing and even grotesque, such as the mandrill’s colorful nose (“My rear end is pretty colorful too”), the horned frog’s “ginormous” mouth, the red squirrel’s furry ears, and the giraffe’s purple tongue. The language of the questions is funny, varied, and irreverent, and the answers are as personable as they are compactly informative. The facial focus makes the experience even more [End Page 261] like a face-to-face interview, and the cut-paper illustrations are particularly strong on dimensional oddities such as the star-nosed mole’s anemone-like proboscis and the puffer fish’s inflated prickliness. Though the text is accessible for reading alone, the Q&A format is a natural for a lively and unusual readaloud—funny voices optional but recommended. A closing cleverly designed diagram identifies the scale of all the animals and their usual habitat; a brief bibliography is also included. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois