THE AMICUS BOOK OF ANIMALS

Meet a varied assortment of animals and learn a brief fact about each one.

There’s no question that the collage-style art here is striking. Boldly clipped animals pose in a sophisticated, modern-looking palette of desaturated primary colors. Illustrator Lundie collages with innovative papers, including weathered graph paper, cardboard, and old maps. Put together, they create a deep, satisfyingly textured feel, as when an old map becomes a cragged iceberg behind aqua waves and a languid-looking narwhal. Textually though, the book flags. One-line factoids such as “Leopard: I’ve got too many spots to count” are correct but bland. There’s no overt connection among the animals, which hail from many habitats, and their labelled sounds are random—why is the readily recognized toucan presented sleeping with a generic “zzzz” noise? The end falls utterly flat, with a confusing raccoon page that suddenly breaks the predictable pattern by introducing a rhetorical question and a peculiar final page featuring a reprisal of all the animals making their strangely chosen sounds: “Oh no! It’s all of us. What a terrible noise!” A companion book on colors features the same lively art but the same dull, nonsensical statements (“Pink is a pretty color”); at least the ending, which asks readers to identify all the colors, is less strained. Extra-thick cardboard pages will hold up to multiple reads.

Handsome but odd.