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 wasp, a hornet or a bee? 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 ("Croak! Most toads have lumpy-bumpy skin and most frogs have smooth, moist skin. Frogs are long-legged jumpers compared to the short-legged toad"). An illustration of both 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 ("Both like to spit"!), 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. For example, the diagonally divided page depicting the differences between moths and butterflies shows beige and brown moths flitting about a black sky dotted with stars at the top; at the bottom, a blue daytime sky backgrounds pink flowers and bright orange and yellow butterflies. The dolphin and porpoise page shows them in a circle nose to tail, with the dolphin's "curved dorsal fin" and "longer beak" on display against a watery turquoise background, and the porpoise with its triangle-shaped fin splashing into a darker blue sea.
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
Shelf Talker: Lovely, comical illustrations pair with manageable morsels of fact in this fresh and entertaining book of mistaken animal identities and easy ways to tell them apart.