Is This a Baby Dinosaur?

Rating

Is that a sheep? Nope! It's a cloud! They're totally different!

There's very little "science" about this book. The title intrigued me, like it was going to be more of a detective story about using science to figure out what a picture actually is. But no, it's really a list of things where it shows a photo and says, "Is this X? Nope! It's not X! Even though it kind of, sort of, if you look at it from the right angle, looks like X." Like, "Are these rocks? Nope! They're lentils!" Okay. And then it explains what the difference between a lentil seed and a rock is. Seriously, once a kid gets old enough they pretty much understand that. You don't have to spell out the difference between a rock and a seed. I think that most children, once they reach a certain age, know that nothing happens if you plant a rock.

So I'm not all that impressed. I wanted to like it, but it ended up being formulaic and irritating. The whole thing is either taking pictures of common things from an unexpected angle or pictures of uncommon things and saying, "Hey! This looks kind of like something totally different! But it's not! Psych!" It's not really all that good.

Message

Sometimes things look like other things.

Publication Year
1984
Age Range
n/a
Number of Pages
30
Number of words on a typical page
20