Beast Friends Forever!: Animal Lovers in Rhyme

Gr 4–7—Children familiar with Beastly Feasts! (2007) and Let's Have a Bite! (2010, both Overlook Duckworth) will cheer for this third collaboration. Animal courtship is infused with quirky human characteristics and some sneaky social commentary. Readers meet Lancelot the Ocelot, doing time for "his romance turned to tragedy, ending in a crime." And Babette the Skunk, having studied with "Parisian perfumers," has fashioned a new scent, "packaged in black and called 'In-d-scent,'/It's sure to enflame any white-striped gent." Twenty-seven poems, some of them several stanzas in length, make up the collection with characters such as a pig named Squig, a valiant meerkat, and a Blue-footed Booby who has "dyed his feet red to be groovy/And at night plays blues on his toobie." Searle's pen-and-ink drawings embellish the tales of love, and pastel touches reinforce the tone of the poems. The verses and illustrations are on opposing pages with white space that makes their appearance seamless. A small creature follows the action from page to page, and there are 17 punch-out stickers on the endpapers. These poems include a rich vocabulary of words such as "besotted," "beau," and "reminisce." They will be fun to read aloud, multiple times.—Teresa Pfeifer, The Springfield Renaissance School, Springfield, MA