There are essentially two ways to put together a book of animal facts. The first is to find an outlandish hook (like “Man-Eating Rodents,” or “How Animals Mate”), or else jazz up what you have with lots of bizarre trivia and eye-catching graphics. A goofy, pun-prone sidekick in the margins always helps, too.
The other option is to go the way of Kids Can Press’s Wildlife Series, of which Snakes is the 12th (after Bats, Bears>, Eagles, Salmon, Wild Cats, and others). The approach here is simply to pick an animal, then fill in the facts. Snakes gets right down to business in the introduction: “Snakes are long, slender animals without arms or legs. They move around on their bellies.” Somehow, you already know there won’t be long discussions coming on snake poo or snakes that kill. Accordingly, in the table of contents we find sober chapter headings like Snakes Are Reptiles, Where Snakes Live, Baby Snakes, and Snakes of the World.
With its no-nonsense approach and terse, one-page chapters, this is definitely a book for beginners. Nancy Gray Ogle’s watercolour illustrations are similarly realistic and detailed, never overwhelming the text or presenting a cartoonish depiction of the reptiles in question (in fact, in a drawing of children being shown a large snake by a zookeeper, the snake comes off as more lifelike than the humans).
What Snakes sacrifices in spark, however, it gains in informativeness and clarity. This would be an excellent resource for a very young reader working on a project. One thing that could have been added (something which, admittedly, is strangely missing from many books of this kind) is a bibliography of more in-depth books and videos for readers intrigued enough by the bare facts presented here to dig deeper.
Snakes