My First Book of Garden Bugs

Last winter was unusually hard for creepy-crawlies, be they creeping into town from Crawley or crawling into crannies to combat the cold. Shortly after the last big freeze it became fashionable to speak of the cranny-crawlers as ‘mini-beasts’ and that’s what ‘Garden Bugs’ means here. Unwin and Sanchez show and tell us about 20 commonly-occurring garden invertebrates so that we may identify and understand them. To do this they use the pleasant strategy of laying clues on a right-hand page and unmasking their chosen subject on its reverse; thus the reader (or readers – this is a fine book for sharing) takes part in inquiry and discovery. The text is carefully spare and seasoned with attractively readaloudable words (Boing!, juicy, champion, lumpy, etc.) and the pictures are super-slick and very accurate despite any reliable indication of scale. So here’s a book that does simply and pleasantly, exactly what it says on the tin, in spite of there being only one genuine ‘bug’ in the cast of 20.