animals

"What Do you Do With a Tail Like This" has the dubious honor of being the only Caldecott Honor Book from 2004 that was a serious contender in the first place. Informative, lively, and easy on the eye, authors Steve Jenkins and Robin Page have created quite a nice little piece of work. For those kids interested in the wide variety of animals, this book is a humdinger. Using a unique series of collage animals, each individual creature has been painstakingly cut from beautiful handmade papers. Sometimes these creatures are done exceptionally well. The skunk resting on its front legs has a furry white stripe made from what looks to be carefully teased paper fibers. Some creatures could have used a little more work. The blood that gushes from the horned lizard's eyes looks like nothing so much as a red/orange Rorschach test. Each section shows a section of the creatures to be discussed with such leading questions as, "What do you do with eyes like these?" or "What do you do with a tail like this?". The next spread shows each animal doing its thing with interesting facts and information. For those kids who'd like to learn a little more about a particular animal, the authors have included in-depth facts at the back of the book.

It's a beautiful book. One suspects that Page & Jenkins may have even gone so far as to hand dye the papers themselves to get just the right shades. How else could they have found a blue that matches so well the blue footed booby's webbed toes or the scarlet pink of a scorpion? Perhaps most impressive in some ways are the different methods employed to fool the reader into believing they're looking at fur, when in fact the page is full of paper layered on paper. There are flaws. Oddly, every animal in this book gets a short synopsis of its abilities, with the exception of one. I don't know what the egg-eating snake did to insult the publisher, but for some reason it does not have a catchy answer to "What do you do with a mouth like this?". There are some factoids about the snake at the end of the book, but such a huge typo is bizarre, and keeps me from granting it the five Amazon.com stars it so richly deserves.

To my mind, "What Do You Do With a Tail Like This" is the most technically complex 2004 Caldecott Honor book to win the award in quite some time. Regardless of how emotionally attached you grow to the book, you cannot help but enjoy looking at the complex and well rendered animals that appear in every shape and form in these pages. This is a book that was well loved during its creation.