Book Review: Wolves by Alain M. Bergeron, Michel Quintin & Sampar (Did You Know? #38)

 

 Note: The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads Savais-tu? Les Loups.

I can and will review every wolf-related book my local libraries have. I am too powerful. You cannot stop me.

This book takes a slightly comical look at wolves and is intended for young children. It gives us several facts about the species accompanied by comics and illustrations with a comedic tone.

Probably the first wolf book I've read on this book that I'd actively call really bad. It fails on multiple levels. The comics and illustrations? Not really funny, just lame jokes. A lot of the facts given out here are just blatantly wrong and outdated so they don't add anything of value, either. Honestly, there's so little text in this book that even if they were accurate they still wouldn't add all that much. Just some very basic facts about wolves you could just get from Wikipedia with no depth added.

Also, the illustrations look...how to put it...? Okay, you know how many professional artists say that in order to stylize something you're drawing, anything really, you need to know how to properly draw it in a more realistic style? So you can break down the basic looks and shapes and simplify it into a cartoon better? Yeah, the illustrator here doesn't have those principles down very well, at least not for drawing wolves in particular. They're very cartoon-y but even then the anatomy looks very broken in many of the illustrations. 

Honestly the "anthro" wolves drawn here (like on the cover) look better than the ones walking on all fours which just have really wonky looks to them. I get that the tone of the book isn't too serious and apparently being "funny" is more important here than spreading actual facts about the species, but you'd still think they'd hire a slightly better artist. Or they just didn't care. The book doesn't look like it has a lot of thought put into it considering they didn't mind putting in blatantly wrong or outdated (even back when it was published) information. 

So, yeah, did you know...that this book is kinda bad? And, just so you know, I'm not being hard on this book because it's for children and thus an easy target. If you've followed me for a while you'll know that I've reviewed several wolf non-fiction books for younger readers by now and a lot of those are pretty good, both in looks and contents (albeit some with slightly dated information). This book had neither of these things working for them.

Rating: 1.5/5