Theme: Wordless Picture Books

Take a look at these three beautiful books created without words. I found these stories easy to follow and moving. I’m reading #libraryloot for research. Can you guess which one of these books has an environmental message?

OVER THE SHOP, by JonArno Lawson; illustrated by Qin Leng. This book is about community and how renting out the rundown apartment transforms a city block.

THE FISHERMAN & THE WHALE, by Jessica Lanan. This book highlights a global problem, “according to World Wildlife Fund, over 300,000 whales dolphins and porpoises die each year after becoming entangled in commercial fishing nets.”

FLY!, by Mark Teague. This book is almost wordless and is about a little robin who doesn’t want to leave the nest.

Are you hungry? There’s a ton of good eating if you know where to look. My friend, Matt Lilley has a yummy, new book coming out from Tilbury House in January 2022, Good Eating: The Short Life of Krill and is illustrated by Dan Tavis. Perhaps krill are not the kind of food you and I eat but they are on the menu for many ocean creatures from humongous blue whales to not-so-big penguins. I recently received the ARC and the Reader Guide (link below) for this thought-provoking book. It is a belly-full of animal facts about their eventful lives and has been nominated as a “Junior Library Guild Selection”.

“Good Eating: The Short Life of Krill follows the life of an Antarctic krill, starting with an egg sinking in the deep sea. The 2nd-person narrative follows the krill as it metamorphoses from a “six-armed oval” into a 26-legged glutton, and as it rises from the ocean’s deep midnight zone to the surface, encountering all sorts of hungry sea creatures as it grows.

Antarctic krill can catch and eat one-celled phytoplankton, and krill in turn are eaten by the largest animals ever to live on earth—blue whales—as well as by seals, penguins, and a host of others. Antarctic krill are the keystone species of the Southern Ocean.

This book will lead to discussions about

·      The ocean food web
·      Life stages and metamorphosis
·      Narrative point of view”