Open up the three six-foot long accordion-style board books in this series to learn how animals get their food. One book is set in the forest, another in the ocean, and the last is about animals in the sky.
The forest book has a green cover and begins,
All around the forest, everyone is hungry. The wild strawberries sweeten in the sun. They turn sunshine into food. But someone nearby is hungry…a slug! The leopard slug eats the sweet strawberries, but someone else is hungry…a beetle. The ellipsis at the end of every sentence on every page builds anticipation for the answer which is revealed as the next panel is unfolded. All the books follow this pattern. The ocean one begins with hungry green algae, and the sky one starts with an elm tree’s leaves. The animals in each book get progressively larger, and end with a bobcat (forest), a killer whale (ocean), and a great horned owl (sky). Long arrows on the page point in the direction of the next panel to read.
Ladd and Anderson’s illustrations look like diorama sets. The animals are toys, and they stay in place with visible strings. The leaves, tree branches, and seaweed are made of paper. None of the scenes show the animals killing or eating one another, but they do appear in their natural habitat. On the back of the panels, there are black-and-white illustrations of the same animals. Beside each drawing is a list of other things they eat. “Leopard seals eat: krill, Antarctic silverfish, squid.” Each book ends with a one-page summary of additional information about the animals’ diets.
The design of this book is eye-catching. Children who don’t like books may like these because they unfold to be bigger than them, and every page ends with an omitted word. This prompts them to guess the next bigger animal. This is a fun-to-handle trio of books, and not scary for children because the focus is on survival and dependence
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