A LLAMA IS NOT AN ALPACA

A guessing game for readers who are a little hazy on the differences between turtles and tortoises, dolphins and porpoises, and other often confused animal cousins.

“Croc or gator? Be a sleuth. / Guess who grins from tooth to tooth?” Not only are several of Jameson’s supposed clues—for telling hares from rabbits, for instance, or bees from wasps and hornets—just as obscure as that one, but some of the solutions on following spreads will leave young nature detectives as perplexed as they were before. Scobie’s cartoon crocodile actually leaves multiple teeth exposed when its jaws are closed, not just the “fourth” one the author specifies. Nor, the way the illustrator angles the two side-by-side reptiles, are the differences in their snouts (another distinction Jameson mentions) visible. The rest of the presentation is similarly phoned in; it seems unlikely that even very young children will ever confuse arbitrary pairings like puffins and penguins, the titular alpaca is shown not in full but only from chin up and really looks more like a sheep than a llama, and a teaser image of a toad leaping off a lily pad (“Frog or toad now hopping in?”) is just cheating given that toads don’t actually live in ponds. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A promising premise sloppily handled.