Animalia

Animalia	Harry N. Adams, Inc. Publishing
Written and Illustrated by Graeme Base	1987
Fiction	31 pages
Reading Level age 4-8,+

Summary

This is an ABC book that is so unique. Each page is covered with details that all begin with that letter. The slogans are funny and creative: crafty crimson cats carefully catching crusty crayfish, horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses. There is hardly a spot on the page that isn’t intricately drawn and includes an animal or object starting with that letter. The texture is amazing and not one page looks or feels the same. One of my favorite pages is G. Great green gorillas growing grapes in a gorgeous glass greenhouse. There are three green gorillas holding grapes with a gnome looking from the side of the page and a giraffe looking thought the glass windows. There is also a goat wearing glasses, a guitar, globe, guard, ghost, gingerbread man, and gargoyle and so many other great sounding letter ‘G’words.

Response

I love the detail of this book. I could spend hours pouring over each page and looking for all the objects hiding throughout the main picture. In the front of the book, there is a poem telling the reader to look for a thousand things on every page and to also look for the self portrait of Graeme wearing a red striped shirt and blue jeans. His illustrations are of a number of mediums, including watercolor, colored pencil, ink and airbrush. He correctly depicts the animals but have them wearing clothes or holding objects. For example, the zebras are black and white but are flying in zinc zeppelins and wearing aviator goggles and leather hats.

Potential Problems

I don’t think there are any prevalent problems in this book. It is fun and interesting and has so much detail to explore.

Recommendations

I would recommend this book to anyone. I think that it would be fun for younger ages to indentify the main animals and for older ages to keep count of all the thousand things they can find and search for Graeme Base.