by Lola Schaefer. Illustrated by Geoff Waring. 32 pages.With its large, colorful illustrations that span two-page spreads (and in the case of fold-out pages, more), this oversize picture book will fly off the shelves. Much like Steve Jenkins "Actual Size" books, Schaefer and Waring explore eleven successively larger animals and how and what they eat.
The illustrations generally provide the reader with a good sense of scale. For instance, the first two-page spread begins the journey with the common earthworm featured in a cross section of earth along with a nail, a coin, rocks and a key, as well as a small spot of brown to indicate the size of dirt the worm can consume. However, the illustrations featured on the fold-out pages might confuse some readers. Unfolding the right-hand page to discover the length of an elephant's trunk, readers must leave the spread unfolded when turning to the next page, which features the teeth of a sperm whale devouring a giant squid. The right side of this spread also opens out, so the whale's mouth takes up two unfolded double pages. The last page wraps up the exploration with a sentence about microorganisms that eventually feed on everything. The remaining unfolded portion of that page launches into more thorough examination of the eleven featured animals (and the microorganisms).
While I loved the illustrations in this picture book, the design bothered me. It is certainly a title that can be shared in preschool story time, since the text consists of about one short sentence per animal. But when the story time reader gets to the last page (with text and pictures about microorganisms) the audience will see either see the last double-page spread that features additional information, or a section of the elephant, or a section of the whale, depending on how the pages are folded. This likely won't matter to most, but I guess I'm a purest. It irritated me that I couldn't figure out how to refold the pages and make the design flow nicely.
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