ANIMAL ADVENTURE

This colorful, fact-filled board book about animals is distinguished by die-cut pages.

This one is all about the animals, each page revealing a slightly different habitat, brightly colored animals, and brand new facts. The factoids range from the familiar (“Owls sleep in the day and come out at night”) to the lesser known (“A rhinoceros’s horn never stops growing!”). Disappointingly, it’s not stated specifically where these animals live, just that they live in “the wild.” This seems like it could be anywhere from the Amazon rainforest to the African savanna, and the trip through the book ends up feeling a lot like a visit to the zoo. Some of the included animals remain unidentified. Each spread features a seek-and-find prompt for extra engagement: “Where are the yellow bananas?” There are a few tourists who appear, two White children and a family with brown skin. They are shown pointing and observing. Each page is busy but not to the point of overwhelming. The cutouts add a lot of visual interest and sometimes enable something from the previous page to remain in the scene even after the page turn. All of the animals are drawn with expressive eyes and faces, kid-friendly though not realistic.

At its essence, this is a nice-looking book of assorted animal factoids.