New West Children's Book Review

Rising Moon Books Reveal Western Animals’ Ways

By Jenny Shank, 9-07-07

The first time my 14-month old daughter watched prairie dogs dart in and out of their holes, she looked at them and guessed: “Cat!” When a deer walked behind our condo, she decided it was a dog.  She can make monkey noises, beats her chest when she sees a picture of a gorilla, and knows what a giraffe is, but she can’t tell a coyote from a bobcat.  House pets, farm animals, and jungle creatures are the stars of most of her books, so how is she supposed to know that those hummingbirds and bats that fly around outside our house are not “quack-quacks”?  Luckily, Rising Moon books (a division of Northland Publishing), publishes a variety of children’s books in which the animals of the West and Southwest take center stage.

Neecy Twinem, who lives in what her website describes as a “pueblo style home on ten, high desert acres” in New Mexico, is the author and illustrator of the Desert Baby Board Book Series.  Twinem’s love for the land is evident in Baby Gecko’s Colors ($5.95), in which the charming Baby Gecko, his eyebrows hovering in mid-air above his eyes, “crawls out of the rough red rocks” that are such a vivid hue, they’ll please any Western kid who is tired of seeing nothing but gray and brown rocks in books.  He next “gazes up at the true blue sky,” a wide, cloudless swath rising over the desert and a mesa in the distance that will look just right to any kid from this region and like a something from another planet to kids from other areas. 

Another book in the series, Baby Coyote Counts ($5.95), features a coyote’s numerically successive encounters with a rattlesnake, lizards, and quails whom he ominously follows “home for lunch” at the end of the book while licking his chops, decked out in a chili pepper-patterned neckerchief.  Well, it’s never too early to learn about the food chain.  Throughout these books, the desert landscape is filled with saguaro and prickly pear cacti, succulents, Indian blanket flowers, and other regionally appropriate flora, which should help kids get a jump on recognizing and naming those plants.  (Baby Snake’s Shapes is also available in the series.)

The blurb on the back of Baby Animals of the Southwest ($5,95, edited by Theresa Howell and designed by David Alston) invites readers to “enjoy the softer, cuter side of the desert.” The animals are depicted in clear, active photos set against a white background.  And they are cute--though the baby skunks might not be endearing to everyone who has tangled with those creatures, few will be able to resist the charms of the blue-eyed mountain lion cubs, the yipping coyote pup, and my favorite, the snorting baby javelina making his way past a log and a cactus.

I Howl I Growl, written by Marcia Vaughan and beautifully illustrated by Polly Powell ($6.95), does a bang-up job of teaching young readers some good, active verbs in addition to introducing the animals themselves.  From “growl” (a yellow-eyed mountain lion baring his teeth) to “race” (a speeding roadrunner) to “hatch” (an elf owl peering out of his cactus home) to “squiggle” (a sidewinder) to “lick” (a bat touching his tongue to a desert bloom) to “sting” (a scorpion), the images and words are precise and entertaining.  Powell’s drawings manage to be true-to-nature but also cute enough not to be scary to very young readers: even the rattlesnake has a pleasant look on its face.

As for my daughter, with the help of these books, we’ve made a little progress on her regional animal knowledge--She’ll hiss when she sees a picture of a snake, she can call the desert tortoise in I Howl, I Growl by name, and now refers to a prairie dog a “doggy” instead of a cat when she sees it…which is about the best I can hope for from a baby.

All of the books discussed in this review are available from Rising Moon Books.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.