Here is another one of those truly inventive non fiction books that will most certainly appeal to young readers and is sure to foster curiosity and lots of laughs.
Have you heard of a Lemon Shark? No. What about an Ice Cream Cone Worm? No. I guess you have heard of a crab apple but it important not to confuse this fruit with a real crab. Go back to the title - Food or Friend? That's how this book works. On one page you can see real foods with a slightly strange names and on the opposite page the 'friend'. Dragon fruit/Dragon; Gooseberry/Goose; Jelly Fish/ Jelly; Mandarin Duck/Mandarin. Word play fun.
Back to those curious creatures that you may not have heard of - at the back of the book you can read a little more about each of them. For example the Lemon Shark is a real shark that is coloured lemon-yellow and Ice Cream Cone Worms build homes from grains of sand in long tubes that look like ice cream cones.
I am surprised by how much I liked this book and I especially enjoyed the facts on the final page which move this book beyond the extended joke of foods with strange names.
The cover is inviting, the end papers are whimsical and the way the dedication is presented inside a lemon is delightful. The crab stalk eyes on the title page work well as a way to increase reader curiosity. Each animal has very appealing facial expressions often achieved by the simple, but also very skilled, placement of an eye dot. I also like the way the pages have graduated colours as backgrounds and the way each key word is highlighted.
Here are a set of teachers notes from the publisher and this book is also available as a Big Book which is terrific because in this format this book will be easy to share with a class. Here is Rebel's Instagram page.
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