Shapes and Patterns in Nature (Nature's Wonderful Colors)

Gr 3-5--With a title like Shapes and Patterns in Nature and a prelude spread describing in text and visuals how nature is full of look-a-likes and repetition (e.g., ocean waves and sand waves), readers might expect gorgeous natural drawings to be grouped by shapes and patterns. Instead they are organized by type of thing; there is a spread on leaves, another on tree bark, and another on fur and hair. The idea of pattern and shape repetition is revisited in the final spread, which organizes columns of drawings by pattern (such as wavy, dotted, branched) and shape (e.g., heart, star, spiral), and the author suggests that readers flip back through the book to find more elements for the headings. The drawings are undeniably lovely, and this could be a solid reference text for an art classroom, but it would be a very unlikely candidate for library borrowing. VERDICT A beautiful coffee table book, but not a necessary purchase for a school library.--Mallory Weber

Beautifully Illustrated Nature Book. Using beautifully illustrated examples from nature, different categories of natural objects and creatures are are explained in brief paragraphs surrounded by a huge variety of labeled examples. Some of the categories include leaves, fruits and vegetables, and flowers, as well as fins and scales, shells, and fur and hair. There's a wide variety of examples given on each two page sprea; I didn't count, but there must be fifty small illustrations of flowers. The colors depend a lot on the examples. Flowers are shown in lots of pinks and reds, vegetables in greens, and shells in browns and grays. Good Points: At the end of the book, there is a chart of twelve patterns and shapes such as round, wavy, branched, and striped, and a few examples given for each. Young readers can then go back through the pages and find further examples of these shapes. I can't think of any shape book that has such extensive illustrations, and this can't be beat for attractive design or number of examples. My only criticism is that there is extensive use of cursive font for labeling, and my students are no longer taught how to write cursive, so it is like a foreign language to them! Since cursive is usually taught in second or third grade, when it is taught, this also makes the book slightly harder to use with emerging readers.

Like Base's 1993 Animalia, this is a rich depository of lovely examples of a wide range of natural objects that will lead to hours of pleasant perusing. - Karen Yingling, YA Books Central