A funny story about a snail trying to find his perfect home. Come explore this board book—with animals hidden under every flap!
Most animals have a place they call home. But what do you do when you don’t have a clue where that place is? This is exactly what happened to one helpless little snail who decided to find his perfect home.
What do you think it will look like? Will anyone take him in? The snail learns what kind of dwellings wasps build for themselves, what it is like for the mole to live underground, and which animals build nests. And he finds that perhaps, while looking for a house, he doesn’t have to look very far. Come join the snail on his adventure and learn about the homes of different animals and what it is like to live in them.
A snail
searches for a proper place to spend the night.
In language a cut or two above the elemental tenor of the plotline, the small
searcher—dubbed “our hero” or “our little hero”—first approaches a burrow
inhabited by a badger who “doesn’t want to share his abode.” He moves on to a
nest full of thrush eggs, an anthill that is plainly too crowded, a cave where
bats “scream and listen to their echoes,” and several other unsuitable
residences…before finally realizing that he’s been carrying a cozy personal
“conch” all along. In the woodsy illustrations, multiple flaps cut into the
sturdy, rounded-corner pages on every spread lift to reveal other animals in
related sorts of holes, nests, and other natural homes. The co-published Whose
Track Is It? features similar flaps that lift to reveal creatures including a
goat with “skillful” legs, a toad who “walks very carefully and thoughtfully,”
and “ungulates” with even-toed (cow) and odd-toed (horse) hooves. They have all
left distinctive footprints for a lost roe deer fawn to follow. Nappie-clad
naturalists may not have the easiest time with these, but their slightly older
sibs will find the content as rewarding as it is challenging. Saldaña renders the
animals and settings with appealing simplicity, and Janská’s leading questions
add further incentive to pore over them.
Familiar premises make the natural history in this Czech import and its
companion all the more digestible. (Informational novelty. 6-8) ―Kirkus Reviews
This cute,
informative board book with pop-up panels reveals the wilderness homes of
varied creatures. In it: a little snail wishes he had a covered space to reside
in, but every possibility he encounters is already occupied, from a badger hole
that only looks deserted, to a nest he has to strain to reach. The intrepid
fellow travels on, dropping facts about animal habitats along the way; he finally
meets a turtle, who reminds him that he’s carried home with him all along.
―Foreword Reviews
This pair
of engaging lift-the-flap books both take readers on journeys through the
woods. The book about homes features a snail who is looking for the perfect
home, not realizing what even the youngest readers will realize right away,
that it’s on his back! The book looks at a variety of burrows, nests, holes in
trees, tunnels, caves and more. The book about tracks tells the story of a fawn
looking for its mother. The book offers a wide variety of tracks to explore.
Some are in the forest, others on the shore, and still others on the farm and
finally in the mountains. There are a lot of lift-the-flap books on the market.
These are something special because they allow little ones to guess the animal
before lifting the flap. They also are full of information about the animals
written at just the right level for young children. There is so much to explore
in each of the books that it’s a real pleasure to open each flap. Perfect for
the youngest budding naturalists. Appropriate for ages 2-4. ―Waking Brain Cells
