TINY CREEPY CRAWLERS

Lice, fleas, ticks, leeches, liver flukes, tapeworms: “Mini bugs rule!”

Using repetition as a pedagogic strategy, selected mighty mites are introduced twice—once with basic facts captioning Calle’s cartoon illustrations and snarky comments in dialogue balloons, and then on facing pages with large portrait photos and similar but differently presented information. In this volume Turner adds to the insects and other creatures already mentioned the tubby tardigrade, roly-poly woodlice, velvet worms (a deceptively cozy moniker: “the velvet worm shoots twin jets of slime from its face-guns, leaving the victim helpless to defend itself”), and some many-legged myriapods. The close-up photos are presented in ghastly color, with insets representing scale in silhouette. In companion galleries in the Crazy Creepy Crawlers series, Turner offers titillating assortments of Deadly Spiders, Extraordinary Insects, and Flying Creepy Crawlers. Of particular interest to browsers may be the picture of the black widow spider lurking on the toilet seat in Spiders and the truly Extraordinary giant weta (short for wetapunga, Maori for “the god of ugly things”).

Suitable browsing for fans of all things crazy, creepy, and crawly.