ALPACAS HERE, ALPACAS THERE

An introduction to the shaggy, big-eyed, impossibly appealing alpaca.

As Tillotson points out, alpacas are raised for their warm fleeces in both their native South America and in North America. To reinforce that connection, the paired illustrations show them being raised, tended, and shorn in similar ways side by side on hilly Andean meadows and in flatter, grassier, fenced-in fields. In both settings, long-necked adults and their little crias fetchingly flock, nuzzle, or gambol springily as the author barrages readers and listeners with basic facts, presented in appropriately bouncy rhymes and parallel blocks of smaller-type prose, all capped by further historical and husbandry notes at the end. It’s a heavy info-load, though delivered with infectious enthusiasm. Readers learn that alpacas were domesticated thousands of years ago in the Andes from their camelid cousin vicuñas and that they bear coats of 16 official colors in North America and 22 in South America, which are regularly removed without harm to the animals. Unlike sheep’s wool, alpaca fleece requires no chemical processing before being spun. The smiling human figures that Peru-born Chavarri slips into her outdoorsy scenes alternate between racially diverse ranchers in the north and, in the south, brown-skinned herders dressed in a mix of modern and traditionally designed and patterned fabrics in a variety of bright colors and earth tones.

Cute, cozy, and rather relentlessly informative.