POLAR ANIMALS

A pop-up survey of wildlife in Arctic, Antarctic, and tundra habitats.

In both art and narrative, food and family are definitely the prevailing themes. Here, an emperor penguin horks up a meal for his offspring while a southern giant petrel lurks nearby, hoping to snatch up a chick; there, pulling a tab dumps a basking seal into the water, where a pod of hungry orcas awaits. Elsewhere, moving a slider brings a newborn humpback whale into the world, a pop-up polar bear and her cub hover over holes in an ice floe, and Laboucarie informs readers that a leopard seal “would gladly munch on a penguin.” An arctic fox stalks a lemming in winter and in summer thanks to a double-gatefold view of the same tundra landscape in both seasons. Still, the carnage remains implicit, because for all the references to diet and predation, none of the animals here are actually depicted chowing down on one another. In a well-meaning if only marginally relevant gesture, four bundled-up children—one with brown skin, three with pale—play with toy cold-weather creatures on the title spread. They are not seen again and are the only human figures.

A glimpse of the wilder side of wild nature, though the actual crunching and munching remain offstage.