CHILDREN OF SUMMER

A fictionalized look at the work of entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, as seen through the eyes of his 10-year-old son, Paul. Working largely in the fields around his French home, and often with the help of his children, Fabre (d. 1915) pioneered the study of insect behavior; Anderson (Food Chains, 1991, etc.) sketches the scientist's career and introduces a gallery of his multilegged subjects. With chatty enthusiasm, Paul describes his father's simple maneuvers, e.g., pinning a ball of dung to the ground to see how dung beetles go about freeing it, and observations, capturing the excitement of waking to a house full of giant male peacock moths drawn by a newly hatched female caged in the study, gamely sitting down to a meal of cooked cossus grubs, considered a delicacy by the ancient Romans, or pausing to hear an anecdote from his father's youth. The incidents are all true, recast from Fabre's books for adults and arranged in short, easy-to-absorb chapters; young naturalists charmed by these glimpses into a lilliputian world will want to sample Fabre's own accounts. (b&w illustrations, index, not seen, map, glossary) (Fiction. 10-12)