Do you have an animal lover in your home? What abou a puzzler? Perhaps you have a non-fiction fan? They are in luck with Beastly Puzzles a very unique, one of a kind new picture book arriving on bookshelves May 7th. Rachel Poliquin’s debut book for children poses the question to the reader: given a set of unrelated objects, can you guess the animal? A fabulously engaging way to look at non-fiction and really hook children into reading and learning more about some really interesting animals. The riddles are not easy to solve, they really require you to think about it and make connections to what you already know about animals. Rachel Poliquin models the book after the descriptions of early naturalists, describing exotic animals by likening their features after more commonly known animals or even household objects.

The illustrations by Byron Eggenschwiler harken back to an earlier age, feeling retro in a modern way. Bold, monochromatic layouts reveal the animals described with a wealth of information about their features and characteristics. Each layout features a fold out page hiding the animal and all of the animal information beneath.

I’m so impressed by the unique and excellent quality non-fiction books children have at their fingertips. Learning is so much more fun when given all of the wonderful new resources available to children and educators. What a fun activity to try with a class of children, creating their own beastly puzzles. I definitely would have used this as an mentor text for my students to enhance their unit on animals and life cycles ( )

This book is a lot of fun. It is very different from the Steve Jenkins type animal guessing books but just as well done as his. I like the authors' choices of animals because it wouldn't be any fun if the animals were so obscure you could never guess the answers. The parts and items used to give hints were descriptive enough without giving too much away and yet hard enough to guess that readers will have to work hard to come up with the correct animal. The illustrations were good and the "About this book" at the end does a great job of explaining where the idea for the book came from and even that was interesting. ( )