Book Review: Deer by Michael Leach (Animal Neighbors)

 

I like deer but I don't read a lot about them. So let's change that.

In this book for younger readers, Leach takes a look at deer, specifically roe deer, and gives us a rundown of things like their food, territory, behavior, reproduction and development, etc.

For a deer non-fiction for younger readers, yeah this pretty much checks all the boxes it needs to. Quite a bit of information delivered to us in simple and to-the-point language? Check. Visually interesting? Check. Factually correct? Check, as far as I know. Covering the most necessary aspects regarding our topic? Check.

There's only really one thing about this book I didn't quite click with, and that's the deceptive title. With a title like Deer, you expect the book to cover deer in general. Meanwhile, the author dedicated this book 99% to roe deer only. Which is nice, I like roe deer and they're often overlooked for their larger and more majestic or impressive-looking cervine cousins. But it just doesn't quite feel "honest" with an all-encompassing title like Deer to just cover only one species. 

There's a few brief sections where other deer species are brought up (usually to illustrate how they compare to roe deer in a certain aspect), but the book is really just dedicated to roe deer. So a title like Roe Deer would be much more apt than simply just Deer. I went into this book expecting to learn about deer in general and, aside from a few brief mentions, I obviously didn't get that.

But that said, all the information it gives us about roe deer is well-told, well-presented and the book in and of itself is far from bad! I just wish the title was more honest because right now I didn't really get what I came for. Or rather, it only covered one of the many species I wanted to learn about.

Rating: 4/5