Review by Booklist Review
Rundell's latest (after the middle-grade fantasy Impossible Creatures, 2024) is a gem of a book, a bestiary of animals that are slowly disappearing due to habitat loss and climate change. She covers everything from the raccoon, crow, and spider to the Greenland Shark, the narwhal, the golden mole, and finally, the human. Each entry is full of descriptions of each animal's remarkable features and fun facts (the wombat can outrun Usain Bolt, young swift chicks prepare for flight by doing "feathery push-ups" in the nest) as well as historic human encounters (a girl whose crow friends brought her gifts, Pliny the Elder's adorable assumptions about how hedgehogs collect food). Rundell's wit fascinates and cuts as she describes characteristics of these fascinating creatures (on the coconut hermit crab, "too large to fit in a bathtub, exactly the right size for a nightmare") and chides humans for their threatening behavior (she sarcastically encourages giraffe-skin collecting, "if you felt like externalizing the apocalyptic whiff of your personality"). This magical collection of very real animals will charm and inspire readers. As Rundell says in her introduction, "The time to fight, with all our ingenuity and tenacity, and love and fury, is now."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rundell (Impossible Creatures), a fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, presents a poignant survey of animal species whose survival is threatened by humans. She notes that because Greenland sharks take 150 years to reach sexual maturity, the species is likely still rebounding from overfishing in the early 1900s, and that punishing poverty and food scarcity in rural Madagascar have eroded traditional taboos against eating lemurs, exacerbating the harms of deforestation and imperiling the island's 101 lemur species. Many anecdotes unexpectedly focus on endangered animals' more populous cousins. For instance, a chapter on raccoons details the spoiled life of Rebecca, Calvin Coolidge's pet common raccoon, while offering comparatively brief descriptions of the endangered Cozumel and extinct Barbados raccoons. Still, the abundant trivia fascinates (94% of all sexual behavior in giraffes is between males; the pangolin keeps its tongue, which is longer than its torso, in "an interior pouch near its hip"), and Rundell approaches her subjects with reverence, as when she writes that blind, iridescent golden moles "burrow and breed and hunt, live and die under the African sun, unaware of their beauty, unknowingly glowing." Animal lovers will cherish this. Illus. Agent: Claire Wilson, RCW Literary. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Literature, folklore, history, and science inform these profiles of 22 endangered species. The award-winning author of young adult books and a superb biography of John Donne turns her sharp literary style and wit to endangered animals in this brisk, eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining book. Animals who exhibit "everlasting flight, a self-galvanizing heart and a baby who learns names in the womb" may seem like inventions, she writes, but the natural world is "so startling that our capacity for wonder, huge as it is, can barely skim the surface." Meet the speedy swift, the American wood frog, and the dolphin. Early on, Rundell reminds us that we've lost "more than half of all wild things that lived." The quick Australian wombat, one of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's favorite pets, is "one of the rarest land mammals in the world." It's possible that some rarely seen, slow, half-blind Greenland sharks are more than 500 years old. She's furious that America has refused to designate the giraffe as an endangered species, even though its numbers have dropped 40% in 30 years. She relishes the strength of the coconut hermit crab, named after the hard-shelled fruit it can crack open, whose intricate group interactions "make the politics of Renaissance courts look simplistic." Of the eight species of bear, six are at risk or endangered, and "the number of hares in Britain has declined by 80 percent in the last century." Storks, conversely, are a "true success story of back-from-the-brink." Other animals she regards with reverence and concern for their future are seahorses (the majority of their species could be gone by 2050), pangolins ("the world's only rainbow mammal...currently the most trafficked animals in the world"), and the blind, iridescent golden mole, which can hear ants and beetles crawling aboveground. Young and old will savor Rundell's infectious enthusiasm for these remarkable and infinitely varied creatures. A clarion call for preservation by way of a delightful bestiary. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
