Honey, I Ate the Kids!

The main aim of children’s non-fiction books is to inspire curious young people to discover more about a chosen topic. This information book does exactly that, hooking readers into learning more about the animal world, starting with a striking title! I believe this handy A5 paperback is excellent value for money, and it takes a different approach on the popular subject matter by focusing on animal families.

I think the explanations at the start of the book, which are entitled ‘There’s no normal in nature’ and ‘What types of animal family are there?’ set out the aims and context of the book well. The author draws parallels with human families and mentions survival in these times of climate change, ’If we take a closer look, maybe we can learn a thing or two from them’ (p.9). The logical structure of the book, following each continent in turn, is clearly set out on the Contents pages and the final two pages of text draw everything to a neat conclusion.

There is interesting information on every page which keeps the young reader engrossed. For example, we learn that Komodo dragons eat their offspring (p.28), Velvet spider mothers can, ‘Liquefy her own internal organs to create a nutritious fluid that she then feeds to them’ [her children] (p.47) and poop-eating capybaras are, ’Often deemed the friendliest animal in the world’ (p.75).

Each spread concentrates on one particular animal, and I liked the variation of text length used over the two pages. Thus, for every animal there is a quiz question with multiple choice answers, a text box with a couple of informative sentences plus a longer piece of a few paragraphs. The illustrations are beautiful and work well with the text throughout. 

This is one of my favourite books I have come across recently. I can highly recommend it for homes, schools and libraries, and am sure it will both challenge and grip its young readers.