Juv Nonfiction: An Egg is Quiet, Dianna Aston & Sylvia Long

And guess what got returned to the library today?

An Egg is Quiet
Dianna Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long
ISBN: 9780811844284
Beautiful and evocative biology/naturalist illustrations and descriptions.

I was very excited about A Nest is Noisy, and mentioned this earlier book in the review, so when this one came back across the counter, I decided to go ahead and talk a bit about this one also.  The two go together so very well, I think.

The doubled end-papers are here also, with a mottled-egg-spotchy outer endpapers, and a collection of all the eggs on the front inner set - eggs that I must note included sea animals, insects, and reptiles.  What I find lovely about this is that the BACK inner set of end-papers don't have the eggs.  What do you think they have instead?  :)

This earlier book has much less text to it - the flowing script guides us simply and succinctly through varied colors and shapes of eggs, before finally getting a bit more meaty with the camouflage, and then immediately tapering back off again to look at sizes, designs, textures, and fossils.  Our last spread gives us an overview of development, looking at a chicken for the birds, a salmon for the fish/reptiles, and a grasshopper for the insect world.

Such a beautiful book.

New Arrivals: Juv Nonfiction: A Nest Is Noisy, Diana Hutts Aston, Sylvia Long

By the duo that did An Egg is Quiet, which I should also review at some point - it's delightful as well, and goes beautifully with this new one.

A Nest is Noisy
Dianna Hutts Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long
ISBN: 9781452127132
Double sets of end-papers, y'all!  The outer set (the actual physical endpapers) are a beautiful tangle of nest material, and the inner set is a spread of all the types of nests (labeled!) that are featured in the actual book.

Books like this make me despair of becoming a good writer myself eventually, because I find myself without the words to explain how beautiful and delightful this book is.  The text is luminous, the examples concrete and quirky.  The illustrations are expressive and individualized, but are also representational and specific.  The flow of the narrative is often clunky in nonfiction, but here we travel smoothly from types of nest (and the notation that nests don't require birds) through environments and habitats, all with specific paragraph-or-longer descriptions of specific animal nests with pertinent information and quirky factoids, through to the end where the beautiful luminous poetry of the overall narrative flow picks back up and carries us to the very end - a quiet nest nestled into an oak branchlet against a dusky sky.

So beautiful.  I just love that there are beautiful creations like this for kids to look at and to learn about and appreciate the wonders around them.