By Steve Jenkins, Robin Page
A guessing game made of animal parts: here are five noses, whose are they, turn the page and find out.
A spread shows you five noses. Just the noses, cut from torn paper, floating on white. The question underneath is 'What do you do with a nose like this?' and your child gets to guess before anyone tells them. Turn the page and there are the whole animals with their answers: the mole finds its way underground with it, the elephant gives itself a bath, the platypus hunts in muddy water. Then it starts again with ears, eyes, feet, mouths, tails. Steve Jenkins cut every animal out of paper by hand and Robin Page co-wrote it, and the two of them won a Caldecott Honor for it in 2004. At the back there are four pages of endnotes, a small picture of every one of the thirty animals with a real paragraph about it, which is where a child who wanted more goes next.
It hands your child the question before the fact, which is backwards from almost every animal book you own, and that one flip is why it holds a room. They commit to an answer, then find out, then want another. A child who cannot sit through a page of facts will sit through thirty of them here because they're chasing their own guesses. And the endnotes at the back do a second job most animal books skip: they let a child who got hooked on the cricket go and read more about the cricket, on the same afternoon, without asking you for anything.