By Ruth Heller
A bright, rhyming tour of every animal that lays eggs, from birds and snakes to fish and insects, ending with the two mammals that lay them too.
This is a bouncing rhyme with real science underneath. It starts where a child expects, with chickens, and then keeps going: other birds lay eggs, and so do snakes and lizards and turtles, and fish, and frogs and toads, and insects and spiders and snails. Then the surprise at the end that children never forget, the platypus and the spiny anteater, two mammals that lay eggs. Ruth Heller's illustrations are big, bold, and saturated with color, and the rhyming lines carry a child from one egg-layer to the next.
It breaks the assumption a child forms fast, that eggs mean chickens, or maybe frogs and butterflies, and nothing else. Heller shows that eggs are everywhere in the animal world, from a snake to a spider to a platypus, so a child comes away with the big picture instead of two examples. The rhyme makes the facts stick the way a song does, and the color pulls in a child who would put down a plainer book.