Zoo Album

Richard Morecroft and Alison Mackay (authors)

Karen Lloyd-Diviny (illustrations)

ABC Books, Australia: 2003

ISBN: 073330600

Genres: animals, factual text, information text, non-fiction, picture book, Science

Issues: conservation, ecology

Shortlisted by CBCA for the Eva Pownall Award for Information Books, 2004.

Meet some of the ‘famous faces' of Taronga (Sydney) and Western Plains Zoos - Selatan the Sumatran Tiger, Kusumona the Black Rhino, Yanga the Tasmanina Devil and Spike the Echidna, amongst others.

 Readers already familiar with Karen Lloyd-Diviny's work (Butterflys Fly and Spiders Spin Webs) will be delighted to share her animal encounters. She uses watercolour, gouache and coloured pencils to move the reader beyond the almost photographic likeness of each creature into their personality, their family grouping, and their habitat.

The text is very reader-friendly - perhaps a little too informal and inclined to employ ‘spoken English' terms for preference, but younger readers will no doubt find that appealing. It certainly makes the book easy to read aloud to a class, which is where a large proportion of the readership certainly lies. Richard Morecroft's familiar friendly tone imbues the text so that the reader has the sense of being introduced to personal friends, rather than animals in zoos.

Each animal is introduced in a four-page layout. A brief ‘fact file' gives the name, age, current height and mass, diet (in the zoo and in the wild), and information about size at birth. Inset boxes ask ‘Did You Know?' and tell you what ‘The Keeper Says', providing the reader with all the miscellaneous information that delights the collector of minutiae. The broader text is presented in columns under subheadings and carries the how, why and where of the animal - how it breeds, hunts and moves; why it is an important part of its native ecosystem and why it needs the help a zoo provides; where it normally lives.

This information text will be of great use to teachers and young zoologists will enjoy the insight it gives into the lives of the animals and their keepers.