Book Review: Beestenboel by Dirk Draulans

 

 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).

A non-fiction book about critters in Flanders and the Netherlands.

In this book, author Draulans counts down a hundred species of animals that live in Flanders and the Netherlands. He gives us a quick description about each and a few facts, as well as how they're currently thriving (or, sadly enough, not, in a lot of cases). There's also a few illustrations accompanying the sections.

For what it is this is a perfectly serviceable book, but it doesn't have a lot of depth to it or anything. I get that with a hundred species featured you can't delve into every single detail, but I really wish there was just a bit more substance to each of the sections rather than just "Here's a species and some facts about them, moving on". Rinse and repeat that a ninety-nine times. The species featured are very diverse (from bugs to arachnids to mammals to birds to reptiles to amphibians) and even a lot of obscure species are featured, which I can definitely appreciate, but there's just not too much information we get about each of them. 

I also think the way in which the sections were spread was far too random. There's no consistency in what type of animal you're going to read about next. Like, you could go from reading a chapter about spiders to one about amphibians to one about a mammal and then next one about a bird. I think it'd have been smarter to just split the book up into sub-sections or chapters with entries dedicated to each type of animal. For example, a section dedicated to entries about mammals which could include sections about otters, beavers, deer, boar, etc. And then next one about birds featuring a certain number of bird species, etc. I just don't think the completely random selection works well, it felt too inconsistent and structure-less. 

Those criticisms out of the way, the book does work. It's exactly what you want and I think that if you're just in the mood for a (mostly, there's a few depressing sections in this about species that are not doing very well in our nature) light read about nature and animals with not too much jargon and depth with some fun facts, this is something that you might like. I personally just wish there was more depth to each entry.

Rating: 3.5/5