By Steve Jenkins
Animals printed at exactly the size they really are, so your child can put a hand on a gorilla's hand and see.
Every animal in this book is printed life-size. That's the whole idea and it's enough. A gorilla's hand fills a page and your child will put their own hand on top of it, every single time, without being asked. The giant squid's eye is so big it needs the page turned sideways. The Goliath birdeater tarantula is the size of a dinner plate and the dwarf goby is a smudge you could lose. The saltwater crocodile's head runs across a fold-out. Steve Jenkins cut it all from torn paper by hand, and because the animals are true to scale, the book is doing arithmetic without ever showing a number. At the back is a small thumbnail of each animal with its real measurements and a paragraph of facts.
This is a book a child understands with their body before they read a word of it, which is why it works for the one who won't sit still and the one who can barely read yet. There's no story to follow and no place to fall behind. The scale is the argument: a fact about size stops being a number and becomes a thing you can measure yourself against, and a child who has laid their hand on the gorilla's hand does not forget how big a gorilla is. It's also the shortest possible route from looking at something to asking a question about it.