BUTT OR FACE? VOLUME 4

The fourth entry in a tail-wagging game for young animal lovers.

With a fresh set of artfully angled and framed photos, Lavelle again challenges viewers to guess whether they’re looking at the “fetching faces” or “beguiling butts” of 13 creatures, from a pink fairy armadillo to an emperor penguin. Turning the page reveals not only the answer, with a full-body photo, but boxes of pun-laden invitations to “Face the Facts” or go “Beyond the Backside” to learn a few basics about each animal’s habits and habitat. “You can’t spell ‘repeat’ without e-a-t,” she writes, for example, about the quokka’s habit of chowing down on food it has just barfed up, and thanks to coral-like tubercules on its skin that help it hide from predators, the reef-dwelling pygmy seahorse is “hard to sea!” “What a re-leaf!” she notes after describing how, once a week, sloths slowly travel to the forest floor to defecate. As usual, she ends with a clever kicker—a baby wombat peeking from its mom’s backward facing pouch, so that both answers are correct—on the way to closing deposits of additional data.

Fundament-ally sound approach to natural history, with built-in hilarity.