Blood and Guts

January 1, 2020
Grades 1-3 The Animals Eat WHAT?! series (4 titles) is hosted by cartoon critic Freddy the Fly, who begins by explaining that some animals have different ideas about what counts as ?food.' The dietary benefits of the titular Blood and Guts are extolled through the experiences of bats, wolves, and even parasitic tapeworms. Each animal gets a spread, with the left page including a large photograph (often with a comic, superimposed speech bubble) and two-to-three sentence introduction, with the right-hand side elaborating briefly on the subject's eating habits. Unfortunately, a quarter of each spread is wasted on a 1-10 rating graphic, through which Freddy arbitrarily ranks the look, taste, smell, and feel of each proposed meal, and while more advanced terms are underlined and defined in a glossary, Duhig doesn't attempt much depth of information, instead using the gross-out factor to relate basic animal information. Early elementary browsers will swarm upon this simple series and may demand something more substantial as a second course.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)