ANIMAL DADS

This striking picture book celebrates the many ways male animals function in their family units: Every page combines one line—narrated by the offspring—with a vividly colored, textured paper collage of an animal father and child, and an additional paragraph of information. Layered, crinkled, subtly shaded, fibrous, and shadowed shapes give a three-dimensional quality to the appealing portraits. Some sentences are immediately clear and can stand alone, e.g., ``They build us homes to live in''; others are vague, e.g., ``And just tidy us up'' is the sentence fragment that appears on the gorillas' spread, making the paragraph of explanation mandatory. The animals are diverse: tamarins, poison arrow frogs, desert isopods, lions, stickleback fish, emperor penguin, etc. The statements are often profound, e.g., the meadowlark ``help[s] us find our voice,'' and, in the case of the gopher tortoise, ``some dads go away.'' (Picture book. 3-7)