101 Facts About Guinea Pigs (101 Facts About Pets)

Grade 3-4-Attractively illustrated with vibrant photographs, these books present factual bits of clearly written information for potential pet owners. The facts are organized in two columns with one or two sentences per fact in large, comfortable type and three or four full-color photos per spread. Williams warns that "An iguana will never be a true house pet, like a cat or a dog, so think very carefully about it before you decide to buy one," but she doesn't say why. Instead, the more charming aspects of the animal, such as its inclination to sit on its owner's shoulders or go for a walk on a leash, are stressed. The glossaries make a nice vocabulary list, but each emboldened word is already defined within the body of the texts, and the definitions are inconsistent. In Guinea Pigs, "rodent" is better defined in the glossary than in the text; in Iguana, "calcium" is well defined in the text, but poorly explained in the glossary. Wanda Curran's Your Guinea Pig (Storey, 1995) for older children and Elvig Hansen's Guinea Pigs (Carolrhoda, 1992) for younger readers would round out the subject in a library collection.
Nancy Call, Santa Cruz Public Libraries, Aptos, CA
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