Animals Work (I Like to Read) - Hardcover

Ted Lewin's career as an artist began with illustrations for adventure magazines, but over the last thirty-five years he has devoted all his time to writing and illustrating children's books, including Peppe the Lamplighter, which won a Caldecott Honor. Many of his books are inspired by his travels around the world. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

PreS-Gr 1—Simple text, one sentence per spread, identifies the animals and their tasks, while a full-spread illustration shows the animals at work in their environments. "Camels carry" depicts a row of camels standing with loads in an Egyptian desert underneath a washed-out blue sky. A dog herds sheep in a bright green field in New York, a reindeer pulls a sleigh in the deep snow of Norway, and an elephant in India lifts large pieces of wood. Humans fit into many of the scenes, but the animals are front and center, with the exception of the last entry of a young boy and his cat that reads, "And I care for my cat." The watercolor illustrations of the various locations and the people that inhabit them are stunningly lifelike, and a world map on the final spread shows where Lewin saw the animals. Easy enough for the very earliest readers.—Laura Hunter, Mount Laurel Library, NJ