Okay, I promise this will be the last wolf non-fiction for younger readers by Jen Green I'll be taking a look at for at least a little bit. They just have a lot of these at my local library and I do want to review at many wolf-related books as possible for the heck of it.
Another thing, as you can probably see, there's not proper picture of the cover of this book. This was the highest quality I could find. Even of my Dutch translated edition I can't find any high quality cover photos online, so this'll have to do.
In this book for younger readers, Jen Green (once more) takes us into the lives of wolves and shows us how they live, hunt, socialize, behave and tells us about their various subspecies and the threats they face.
Much like the other Jen Green wolf book I have reviewed so far, this book has a bunch of outdated/wrong information in it. Not just pertaining to the usual wrongly-described pack structure (still using the alpha-beta-omega theory) but also just some blatantly wrong facts about their behavior, subspecies and dire wolves.
Of course, some of this information has simply been dated (such as dire wolves being closely related to wolves) and this book cannot help that, but other information such as dominance theory had already been debunked by the time this was published. This book also seems to hint at red wolves being a coyote-wolf hybrid rather than a wolf subspecies, something I think is either also outdated or just wrong. They definitely are their own subspecies. This theory could apply to Eastern coyotes as they have been proven to have both dog and wolf genes in them, but not red wolves, which definitely are their own thing.
The wrong information aside, this book also is utterly lacking in presentation. Other wolf books for children I've reviewed usually had an interesting presentation. Lots of photos, drawings and colors positioned interestingly across the pages to draw the reader's attention. This book instead just has some boring black-and-white text and pictures/photos scattered throughout, but it does nothing to draw the attention of the reader. It doesn't look like a lot of thought went into the presentation here and I think that if I were a kid and I'd pick up this book, I'd be bored by how it looks. This of course is less of an issue as an adult, but when you want to draw a young reader's attention you have to make things look more interesting rather than just text with a few photos.
So overall I can't give this book a high rating. It's simply too dated and doesn't look appealing for younger readers. I recommend more modern children's wolf books with better presentation instead.
Rating: 2/5
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