Look Again: Secrets of Animal Camouflage, written by Steve Jenkins, reviewed by Katy Golden

Summary: How do animals stay hidden? Steve Jenkins and Rhonda Page answer this question with full-page color illustrations that take the reader from the coral reef to the Arctic to the forest floor. Two two-page spreads are dedicated to each biome. The first introduces the habitat with a sentence or two of description and illustrations of animals camouflaged in that environment. The following two pages include labeled illustrations of each animal against a white background, along with a picture of them in their habitat and a sketch of the animal next to a hand or a human for scale. The final few pages of the book give more in-depth information on each animal by habitat.

Straight Talk for Librarians: Readers will be quickly drawn in by the color illustrations and the challenge of finding each camouflaged animal. Additional interest will be for the animals themselves, since many of the examples chosen for this book - the pallid ghost crab, for instance, and the rainbow lorikeet - are not likely to be familiar to most readers. For someone looking to learn a lot about the science behind camouflage or facts about animals, this is not the right resource; labels are brief and more suited to a read-aloud or general discussion about adaptation. Pair this with Eric Carle's "Mister Seahorse" for a fiction/non-fiction contrast, or use as an engaging hook for a study of camouflage.