The Fascinating Animal Book For Kids: 500 Wild Facts – Ginjer L. Clarke

★★★★

The MARINE IGUANA is the only lizard that lives its whole life underwater.

Animals, animals and more animals!

If you are a curious kid (or adult, cause, let’s be real, animal books are for kids of all ages), then this book is for you.

It is chock-full of absolutely wild facts.

The smallest bat – and mammal – in the world is the BUMBLEBEE BAT. It weighs less than a penny.

Facts that absolutely boggle your mind!

Today’s HAMSTERS are all descendants of a single hamster family that lived in Syria around 1930

And ones that will totally make you giggle!

The SPOTTED WOBBEGONG’s beard looks like seaweed. Confused prey swim right up to its mouth.

(ha! Spotted wobbegong! ).

If you want a fabulous fact book with plenty of amazing photographs, then this one is for you!

The largest butterfly is the QUEEN ALEXANDRA’S BIRDWING. Females have a wingspand of about 12 inches (30 cm)

Overall – I adored The Fascinating Animal Book!

Though, to be fair, I am a huuuuge sucker for animal books.

I literally cannot get enough of them but I really did enjoy this one in particular.

I remember being the age range for this book (ages 9-12, possibly younger if you read it with a parent) and wanting to learn everything about everything as quickly as possible. And this book is perfect for that type of kid.

Each page had multiple, vibrant photographs accompanied by many facts – about the animals on the page or about animals that fall under the same category.

The facts were fun, zany and exciting! Though I did hear some of them before, most of them were new to me.

The organization of the book is a bit different from the usual animal-fact-book.

Each section is devoted to types of animals and had several 2-page spreads based on different categories.

There’s the usual like “Awesome Elephants” and “Big Cats” but there are also categories like “Noses to Know” and “Horned Heads” which are a little less strictly categorized.

As much fun as it was to see so many different animals and facts, it did seem a bit chaotic – especially with the looser categories which could have a variety of completely different species on one page spread.

So many of the facts just boggled my mind – like the one about where hamsters came from! Which sometimes left me with questions (which I ended up googling).

And I really would have wanted there to be more information but each animal only got a single sentence (or two) about them and many of them were crammed onto one page.

One thing that really enhanced the book was the photographs.

The photographs were really high quality and brought a whole new dimension to the book. They were so much fun to look at!

Part of me really wished that there was a photograph for every animal fact mentioned.

For example, the bumblebee bat from the quotes above seems almost inconceivably small (weighing less than a penny!) but there’s no picture to accompany it (and so I googled, again) (it is very smol).

Overall – this book was incredibly cute and certainly delivered on its premise! Highly recommended for the curious kid in your life!

With thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.