Wolves and People

School Library Journal

Gr 2-5-Both fondness and fear fuel the fascination with wolves. Stone's six volumes will feed this fascination with well-crafted photography, vocabulary-building words, and a sprinkling of facts. The tidy 24-page format is complete with a table of contents, a map (the same for all), a glossary, further-information notes (the same for all), and an index. Pack in 12 or more photos and the few remaining pages of text should be concise and crystal clear-should be. Unfortunately, the craft of Stone's photography is missing from her texts. Also, while the photos would lend themselves to a wolf calendar or coffee-table book, they are too decorative to enlighten a young audience. The pictures do provide a nice balance of warm fuzzy shots and bloody muzzles at a recent kill. While there are ample bits of information presented in simple terms, the liberal use of qualifiers (sometimes, may, perhaps) weakens the presentation. The effort to increase vocabulary is laudable though at times the coupling of a new word in bold type followed by a partial definition is confusing. The style of writing is consistent with the trend to crank out many books using much of the same information with different pictures to charm libraries looking for sets to accommodate research in the lower grades. However, the end result is very confusing. Youngsters are likely to be overwhelmed and underwhelmed.-Jody McCoy, The Bush School, Seattle, WA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.