Creaturepedia - A Book Review

Back in March, I received the Mumsnet Blogger newsletter and my attention was immediately drawn to the heading "Fancy reviewing some beautiful children's books?" Oh yes! I thought, Marco has loved books even when he was a tiny baby and books and stories are a big part of his everyday routine.

I expected there would be many requests to review the Creaturepedia book from Wide Eyed Editions which looked interesting just from the cover shot in the email so I was delighted when the book arrived on my doorstep about a month later.
As I took it out of the packaging, the first thing I noticed was that it was obviously a high quality publication - large  and  heavy (as you'd expect any "pedia" to be!) with the title embossed into the satin finish cover. The cover features a colourful grid of quirkily drawn animals, hinting at the potential abundance of fascinating drawings of animal life there might be within.

Adrienne Barman's drawings of stylised animals are beautiful and charming, printed on matt paper which has a lovely feel (and smell).
I love the way the book is ordered into groups of animals such as "The giants", "The munch-it-uppers", "The prickly ones", "The red heads" and most poignantly "The endangered" (each animal has tears in its eyes).

As an adult that once went to art college and still partakes in creative pastimes, I can fully appreciate the care, love and attention to detail that has gone into this wonderful book, every page is an absolute delight.

The pages don't just show drawings of animals, but also beautiful scenery of the creatures' habitats as well as little snippets of information and interesting facts. I learnt a thing or two going through this book with my son and even discovered some new animals. I consider myself to be pretty well versed in natural history. As a child my parents were so strict with TV that one of the few things we were allowed to watch were natural history documentaries, so I wasn't really expecting it to be educational for me!

So what did Marco think of it? Well, despite being only just over one year old, he seems to really enjoy it. He has a little repertoire of words which include Bee, Bird, Bear (spot a theme there?!) so as we went through the pages he was pointing and exclaiming with most of the animals falling into one of the categories "Bee!", "Bear", "Bird!"
This isn't really the kind of book you'd read from cover to cover but it's a great book to dip into and explore a few of the categories and delight at the colours and characters of the creatures.
I foresee this becoming a favourite book for Marco that has a great deal of longevity - I can imagine it will still be relevant to him in 10 year's time.

Would I recommend this book?
Whole heartedly! Because it's beautiful, fascinating and is suitable across a wide range of age groups. Most importantly, I'd recommend it because it is bound to instil a love of animals and wildlife in all that read it and mother nature sure needs all the support she can get these days.