Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
If you were a Penguin
Illustrator: Wendell Minor
Nonfiction Picture Book
For ages 5 to 7
HarperCollins, 2009 ISBN: 978-0061130977
Many people love penguins. There is something about the birds’ coloring and their often comical ways that makes them hard to resist. What many penguin fans don’t know is that penguins are not just cute looking birds who cannot fly. They come in many sizes, live in a variety of habitats and they do some truly remarkable things.
In this wonderful picture book young readers find out what it would be like if they were a penguin. One of the things that they would be able to do would be to “fly underwater,” speeding along like a little torpedo. They would live on land, but would spend a lot of time in water. They could inhabit hot places, or very cold ones, and they could live underground in burrows or spend their days perched on the ice. They could have sleek tuxedoes like Adelie penguins, or crazy feathery does like Rockhopper penguins.
Throughout this engaging book Florence Minor’s informative, often amusing, rhyming lines of text are paired with Wendell Minor’s gorgeous paintings to take young readers into the lives of some of the world’s penguin species.
At the back of the books readers will find a selection of interesting “Penguin Fun Facts,” and there are also a series of illustrations that show readers the names of the penguin species featured in the book.
