Melvin Berger

Creatures That Glow is a non-fiction, children’s, picture book, and as the subtitle suggests it’s all about bioluminescent animals. It gives general information about what bioluminescence is, then discusses specific creatures that possess this trait, along with the ways in which they use it. The insects and animals covered include fireflies, glowworms, railroad worms, centipedes, jellyfish, hatchet fish, squid, angler fish, and flashlight fish. I’m fascinated by bioluminescence, so I’m pretty sure I picked up this book at a library sale, thinking it would be a good introduction to the topic for kids. Overall, I thought it did that job fairly well and would be a good book for beginning readers in the advanced preschool to early elementary age range.

As an adult, though, when reading and evaluating children’s books, the things I tend to look for most are writing that is engaging while also being understandable to its target audience, eye-catching illustrations, and whether it can teach me something, even as a grown-up. As for the writing itself, I don’t think kids would have any trouble comprehending it and it’s simple enough that early readers could probably manage most of the words on their own. However, the style of it takes a pretty basic, just-the-facts approach that IMHO, doesn’t really engender a lot of excitement for its subject. As for teaching me something, I can’t really say that I learned a whole lot from it. I don’t recall ever reading anything about railroad worms, but I was pretty familiar with all the other creatures, so very little of it was new to me. Then there are the illustrations. Because the cover appears to be created from actual photos, I went into reading it, thinking that there would be some cool images. Instead, this book was entirely illustrated by an artist. The actual artwork isn’t bad, but the issue I had with it is that all of the pictures except a couple are very dark, so dark that it’s hard to make out the creatures on the page. I understand why this style might be employed, because after all, one can only see glowing creatures in the dark, but it had the effect of subduing the images so that they don’t really draw the eye at all. All that said, the book is fine for what it is, but a quick Amazon search brought up several other books on the topic that look like they might be better and more engaging.… (mer)