Animal Dads by Sneed B. Collard III, Steve Jenkins (Illustrator)

From the Publisher

This whimsical and intriguing picture book explores the different roles of fatherhood in the animal kingdom. Readers will learn about various animal dads and their many different parenting skills: baby-sitting - an emperor penguin dad watches over the eggs for nine weeks while the mother searches for food; hunting - a wolf dad leads the pack on hunting trips and brings meat for new pups to eat; giving birth - a seahorse mother's eggs hatch inside the dad's special belly pouch. Sneed Collard's concise, clear text and award-winning artist Steve Jenkins's informative cut-paper collages reveal unique tasks that animal dads perform in raising their offspring.

Publishers Weekly

This eye-catching book is a celebration of all the things human and animal dads do: building homes, playing, watching out for strangers, baby-sitting, housecleaning and evenin the case of the seahorse and pipefishgiving birth (here the animal world leaves human males in the dust). Collard (Do They Scare You? Creepy Creatures) associates the work of human fathers and animal ones through concurrent streams of text: each spread includes a simple statement of what dads doe.g., "[Dads] shelter us from harm"and a fine-print explanation of the pictured animal dad's actions: a cichlid fish "shelters" his babies by letting them swim into his mouth. Likewise, the line "And help us find our voice" is accompanied by a meadowlark teaching his son to sing. Jenkins's (Duck's Breath and Mouse Pie: A Collection of Animal Superstitions) handsome cut-paper collages include inspired choices of texture: fibrous papers suggest, alternately, fur, grass, bark, scales and sand. He uses deftly cut shapes and strong, remarkably varied colors: one underwater scene of a swimming salmon dad fairly glows, as if the rice-paper rocks were catching light filtered through water. While one page acknowledges that "Some dads go away," the bulk of the book is a tribute to those guys who "do things for us that we never even know"a timely sentiment with Father's Day around the corner. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)

Animal Dads is the sort of book parents may appreciate as much as their children." —The New York Times Book Review

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 2Animal Dads takes a refreshing look at the natural world with fathers cast in the caregiver role. Fish, birds, and mammals demonstrate a wide array of parenting skills as the male of the species protects, feeds, and teaches. Each father and his offspring are presented on a single or double-page spread, illustrated with striking, cut-paper collage figures. The large, lifelike creatures are set against backgrounds that are true to each animal's natural habitat. Representing rivers, woods, grasslands, treetops, and desert burrows, the backdrops make for an interesting and varied layout. There are two levels of text; a simple explanatory sentence in large print and more detailed information about the behavior of each animal father in small print make this book appropriate for different age groups. Mentioned briefly are dads that do not participate in the rearing of their young. As animal fathers have been overshadowed by the numerous books featuring animal mothers, this unique selection helps balance the science shelves for young children.Diane Nunn, Richard E. Byrd Elementary School, Glen Rock, NJ

Kirkus Reviews

This striking picture book celebrates the many ways male animals function in their family units: Every page combines one line—narrated by the offspring—with a vividly colored, textured paper collage of an animal father and child, and an additional paragraph of information. Layered, crinkled, subtly shaded, fibrous, and shadowed shapes give a three-dimensional quality to the appealing portraits. Some sentences are immediately clear and can stand alone, e.g., "They build us homes to live in"; others are vague, e.g., "And just tidy us up" is the sentence fragment that appears on the gorillas' spread, making the paragraph of explanation mandatory. The animals are diverse: tamarins, poison arrow frogs, desert isopods, lions, stickleback fish, emperor penguin, etc. The statements are often profound, e.g., the meadowlark "help[s] us find our voice," and, in the case of the gopher tortoise, "some dads go away."

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