This book is GORGEOUS.
However, my kid doesn't really care about it. While the illustrations are super beautiful, I don't think the impressionistic style works for curious, literal minded kids. There's also very minimal information about the animals featured. ( )

My five-star rating is for the artwork, which is beautiful. The text accompanying most (though, annoyingly, not all) of the illustrations is factual rather than lyrical, and I'd have preferred the latter. It is, however, a book to be looked at rather than read so, on that basis, I haven't reduced my rating.

This was a book I saw in its original German publication and which, despite not speaking German, I was sorely tempted to buy due to it being such a gorgeous artefact (I bought instead, Mervyn Peake, Oscar Wilde: Extracts from the Poems of Oscar Wilde, to which I'd happily give ten stars out of five), so when I saw it in its English publication, I had no hesitation in buying it as a gift for a young nephew, and only a slight hesitation before deciding he'd like a different book better and that I'd therefore best keep this one for myself! ( )