By Celia Godkin
The wolves leave the island by accident, and the book follows what happens to every animal that stayed behind.
An island in northern Ontario, everything in balance. Then the wolf cubs climb onto a raft that has drifted up on the beach, it floats out, the parents swim after them, and the island has no wolves anymore. For a while nothing changes. Then the deer, with nothing hunting them now, have more fawns, and more again the next year. They eat the grass and strip the leaves off the bushes until there is nothing left. The rabbits that lived on those plants go hungry, so there are fewer rabbits, so the foxes go hungry too. The mice, the owls. The book follows the hunger all the way down the chain and does not rush past it. Then one winter the water freezes, the wolves walk back across the ice, and they start hunting deer again. Slowly the island recovers. Godkin trained as a biologist before she painted any of this, and it shows — she never explains the science so much as lets you watch it happen.
Most nature books for this age show a child a habitat that works, everything in its place doing its job. This one shows a food web breaking. It pulls out a single piece, the wolves, and lets you watch the whole system fall apart, then come back once that piece returns. The counterintuitive part is the heart of it: take the predator away and the prey do not flourish, they multiply and then starve. That is genuinely hard to grasp, and there is almost nothing else at this reading level that even tries it. Godkin was a working biologist and scientific illustrator, so the science holds up and the pictures carry as much of it as the words do.