Bright, happy colors reflect all the hues of nature in a lighthearted, informative picture book that helps readers differentiate between often-mistaken animal identities.
Is it a hare or a rabbit? A crocodile or an alligator? A Llama Is Not an Alpaca offers fun, factual answers to such questions. Author Karen Jameson (Moon Babies; Time to Shine) blends scientific fact with playful poetry to help young readers pick out the differences between 10 sets of critters. A short rhyme ("Frog or toad now hopping in?/ Look for thick and bumpy skin") accompanies a picture of one of the two. Readers turn the page for the answer ("It's a toad!") and a playful and fact-filled nugget of information about both animals. An illustration of the two creatures lets newly informed readers make the visual comparison themselves.
Illustrator Lorna Scobie's animals, while adorably cartoonish, are drawn with enough detail to drive home the variations among each pair or trio. The alpacas and llamas, for example, have big, googly eyes and fur drawn with scratchy, curling lines. But a close-up of an alpaca and a llama sticking out their tongues at one another, while silly, also shows the "shorter ears and chubby, furry face" of the alpaca and the "longer, curved ears" of the much larger llama. Scobie (Duck, Duck, Dad?; Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!) supports Jameson's facts with color, detail and beautifully layered fur/feather/shell/skin/exoskeleton patterns.
Jameson and Scobie's partnership has generated a near-perfect nonfiction picture book with elements many young readers love: cheerful pictures saturated with color, lively rhymes and the kind of facts that are likely to stick for a lifetime. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor