February 15, 2014
Grades 2-4 First published in Quebec and now available in English, the Do You Know? series offers bits of information about certain animals spiced up with cartoons in which those animals dress and talk like people. A typical double-page spread includes a line or two of informational text illustrated with one or more colorful digital pictures inspired by the factoids. Speech balloons further the comedy. In the brief main text, the vocabulary can be surprisingly challenging. The emphasis varies from book to book. Toads, which devotes 20 pages to mating, uses words such as temperate, semen, and gelatinous without explanations in context or definitions in the glossary. The playful illustrations will draw readers to the books, and in theory, the humor may help children absorb and retain the information. In practice, it's not so simple. The comedy isn't always closely aligned to the facts, and the jokes can fall flat, perhaps losing something in translation. At other times, the humor seems aimed at adults rather than kids. Still, the concept and the idea of nonfiction in translation are novel enough that larger libraries, at least, may want to give the series a try.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)