Innovative Octopuses, Half-Brained Birds, and More Animals with Magnificent Minds (Extraordinary Animals)
“The author knows what she’s talking about and explains things in kid-friendly terms.”
If you’re looking for a nonfiction book for nine to twelve year olds (in grades four through seven), that is jam-packed with brain facts, this is the book for you. Six chapters explore the brains of many types of animals including octopuses, parrots, squirrels, more birds, tortoises, and cetaceans (whales). The chapters have so many sidebars and tangents going every which way that at first, the book seems confusing.
Page eleven is part of the main part of chapter one. Then the page numbers stop because of the sidebars and they don’t resume until page 22 in chapter two. Side bars in Chapter One include: Did You Know?; How Many Brains Do You Have?; Aliens Among Us; Left, Right, and Everything In-between (a four-page sidebar); Activity Rapid Responses; and Bonus.
Glossary terms in blue boxes defined in Chapter One include: neurons, dendrite, axon, neurotransmitter, nervous system, gut-brain axis, neuroscientist, evolution, astrobiologist, and reflex. The pages are color-coded on the edges, goldenrod yellow for chapter one, green for chapter two, etc. Are you confused yet?
In Chapter Twp, the glossary words are now defined in yellow boxes instead of blue ones. Why not stick to what is done in Chapter One? The book designer has gotten a little bit carried away. Uniformity can be a good thing in a nonfiction book filled with facts.
The author knows what she’s talking about and explains things in kid-friendly terms. “Make two fists and put them together. That’s roughly the size of your brain, and that small, fragile organ is in charge of a lot of stuff.” If the reader sticks to the white pages first and skips the sidebars, it’s much less confusing.
Chapter Three starts on page 40, except there’s no page number on the first page of chapter three. The same thing happens in chapter four. It starts on page 60, but there are no page numbers until page 64. It’s unfortunate that the lay-out is distracting from the easy-to-understand text. One consistent thing is that each chapter ends with Activity and also Bonus. Chapter One has bubbles accenting the edges of the pages for octopuses, Chapter Two has birds in flight? (One would expect feathers for parrots), Chapter Three has squirrel handprints, Chapter Four has webbed feet, Chapter Five has tortoise footprints, and Chapter Six has random seaweed fronds (whales).
For Further Exploration in the back (not considered a chapter) has red page edges, Source Notes are yellow, Bibliography is green, Acknowledgements are purple, Image Credits are red, Index is blue. Along with the ten-word title, the book is overall very busy and trying to do too many things. There is art, and there are photographs. But the meat of the book is still on those white pages with black type. If a person can get past all the distractions at every turn, there’s a good informative book on brains here, and how the six featured animals’ brains differ from the human brain.
The book is a lot for the human brain to handle, but in the end, the white pages are worth the bother.