Cheryl Blackford

This is a little different from the nonfiction picture books I usually get excited about and I have some concerns about the accuracy, but it would be great to spark a discussion with kids.

The story follows a male coyote through four seasons. It begins in the cold winter as the coyote hunts for food under the snow. Next comes spring and the coyote mates and has cubs, still hunting for food in the ponds and woods. In summer there is more food to be found both in the wild and in the urban areas the coyote moves through; he and his family enjoy a treat of stolen sausages. Finally, fall arrives and winter returns. A brief informational note discusses how coyotes adapt and live in both urban and rural environments.

The big draw for me is the lovely artwork. Caple's rich illustrations show the coyote's quiet integration into urban life as he slinks through the fields, across bridges, and by roads. The effortless detail not only gives an accurate picture of the coyote's behavior but also parallels it to human life, as he watches humans interact with the seasons as well. There are also different things to find in the pictures, like the vole the coyote is hunting or the soft whiteness of falling snow.

My main issue is with the text. It feels as though it is struggling to be poetic but only ends up sounded forced. "Coyote skulks until everyone leaves. He drools, darts, and snatches." or "Near the shore, water birds snooze in feathery flocks. Shaggy shadows stalk, bounce, and pounce." It's not exactly poorly written, it's more that it would make a difficult read-aloud to wiggly children because of the wordiness and while I enjoy teaching kids new words, there are too many unfamiliar adjectives to dump on them all at once. My other concern is factual - the coyote who is the main protagonist of the story is clearly male. He dens with his mate, hunts for the pups, and then takes them out to teach them to hunt. That didn't sound right to me; a quick search informed me that while male coyotes may hunt for and regurgitate food for their pups, the female doesn't allow them in the den and they do not stay together as a "family". Also, the female teaches the pups. Of course, I'm not an expert in coyote behavior and they are very adaptable, but females, not males, teaching pups to hunt and survive is fairly common in animal life and I found it exasperating that the author chose to...give the coyotes' traditional gender roles? I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it. I would like some fact-checking and more sources listed though to justify this.

Verdict: I loved the art, not so much the text. This is a small press title and therefore more expensive, but the lack of materials on coyotes makes it a strong purchase for my library. If I used it in storytime we would probably discuss the pictures though and skip most of the text. I won't wholeheartedly recommend or not recommend this; I feel like I don't know enough about coyote behavior to accurately judge.

ISBN: 9780873519649; Published 2015 by the Minnesota Historical Press; Borrowed from another library in my consortium… (mehr)

One hungry coyote attempts to feed his growing family through the seasons. In some seasons finding food is hard for the coyote, in others, it is easier. Coyote has to do all of this around people, too which makes his job even harder.

Hungry Coyote is a wonderful children's environmental education book perfect for a large age range of kids from 4-12. There are great descriptions of the weather that uses alliteration, rhyming and a larger vocabulary. There are also very realistic descriptions and pictures of how coyotes hunt, what they eat and their habitat. Overall, this book provides a good view into how an animal that a lot of people live near lives their own life and interacts with humans.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review.… (mehr)

3.5 stars. This review is also available on my blog, Read Till Dawn.

First things first: the teaser is pretty much entirely misleading. Lizzie and the Lost Baby is not the story of a girl who befriends a gypsy boy, discovers a baby, and finds their friendship threatened as they hunt for the child's parents; it's the story of a homesick girl who finds a baby in a field, a troubled gypsy boy whose arm was twisted into leaving his sister in that field, and the world of hurt and prejudice that lies between what's right (bringing the baby back to her family) and what's easy (leaving her with Lizzie's foster mother, who thinks the child is her own dead toddler). It's a story about people who are blinded by prejudice, and about the extremes children sometimes have to go to in order to get around the twisted decisions made by the adults.

The storyline did sometimes feel a little contrived - the adults especially struck me as being rather one-dimensional (they seriously don't think twice about stealing a baby? And they refuse to discuss the morality of such a choice with Lizzie when she thinks it should go back to its birth family?). Part of that, though, could be that they are presented from the point-of-view of a ten-year-old. Little girls aren't exactly known for presenting very nuanced views of adults, are they?

My other main question about the story is about the relationship between the Gypsies and the townspeople. I know absolutely nothing about this aspect of life in England during WWII (I don't know much of anything about Gypsies in general, to be perfectly honest), so I was shocked by the horrible bias the English people had toward the Gypsies, basically making them out to be terrible scoundrels who were less than human. This level of prejudice is upsetting in anyone, but even more startling when it's during WWII but taking place in England, rather than Germany. I guess I have to assume it's an honest depiction, though I'd like to imagine Blackford got it wrong.

Lizzie and the Lost Baby is a small book, only 192 pages with pretty large font, and it's not a very complex book in terms of storylines - there's pretty much only one, focused around a few fairly well-developed children and some rather one-dimensional adults, and the novel follows it from beginning to end without weaving in too many other subplots. I found it a little too quick a read for my tastes, but can see it being a great book for middle-school kids not ready for more complex, hard-hitting books about life for minority groups during WWII. Honestly, I think most of my issues with the book can be explained away by the fact that I'm used to expecting more: more meat, more complexity, more depth. I forget that this is a book that kids as young as nine or ten could read, and that for them it's actually quite thought-provoking. This could be quite a conversation starter about prejudice and moral choices (and, for that matter, when it's permissible for kids to disobey authority figures).

You'll have to check it out for yourself, but I'd suggest this book for children just starting to learn about prejudice and discrimination, and basic human rights. I wouldn't, though, go out of my way to recommend it to teens or adults - it's just not meant for older readers. I'll be keeping an eye out for Blackford's future books, though: if this is her debut, I can't wait to see what she'll come up with next.

Disclaimer: I received a complementary ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.… (mehr)