(++++) EVERYDAY WONDERS

You Are a Honey Bee! By Laurie Ann Thompson. Illustrated by Jay Fleck. Dial. $18.99.

You Are a Raccoon! By Laurie Ann Thompson. Illustrated by Jay Fleck. Dial. $18.99.

     There are so many children’s books about animals that focus on the faraway and exotic that it is a real pleasure to encounter a series showing the fascinations of critters much closer to readers’ homes – maybe even in their back yards. The Meet Your World series is aptly titled, since it tells kids stories about their world, not somewhere far away that they may never visit and that is inhabited by admittedly fascinating creatures that, however, they may never get to see except in books or videos.

     Laurie Ann Thompson handles the Meet Your World books about bees and raccoons exactly the same way, from birth through maturity – and while Jay Fleck’s illustrations certainly anthropomorphize the features and expressions of bees and raccoons, just as Thompson’s words imbue the animals with human thoughts and attitudes, the underlying science and basic appearances are correct and make for solid introductions to worlds that coexist with the human one and, at the same time, are part of it.

     The bee book features a huge-and-round-headed bee with a near-constant smile – wholly unrealistic, but correctly colored – that emerges from its birth cell in the hive and goes about the various parts of its life. To relate the bee’s activities more closely to human ones, Thompson uses action words and Fleck then shows how human kids do things described by those same words. For instance, the bee chomps out of its cell and wiggles through the hole it makes – and Fleck shows a picture of a boy going “chomp!” on a doughnut and a girl doing a “wiggle!” with her body. Later, when the growing bee squeezes royal jelly from its head to feed wormlike bee babies, Fleck shows a boy going “squeeze” while putting mustard on a hot dog. And so on, page after page. Factual material is sprinkled throughout the book but always kept personalized: “You are twelve days old. You pull wax from glands on your belly and use it to build.” Later, when the bee leaves the hive to gather nectar from flowers – “It’s time to FLY to them!” – Fleck shows, in the margin, a girl with a superhero-style cape pretending to fly. Smiling kids enact whatever words are used to describe the bee’s activities, such as “waggle, turn, waggle, turn” for the bee’s dance to show other bees where to find nectar-rich flowers. The cute pictures of bees and cute pictures of children make a visual connection between bee and human, even as the use of the same words to show bee and human activities reinforces the notion that bees and humans inhabit the same world. The book is, of course, vastly oversimplified, but never to the point of scientific inaccuracy, and its efforts to show bee-human similarities, however overstated, should help the youngest readers appreciate the remarkable nature of their everyday world.

     The raccoon book uses exactly the same techniques. It starts with “you” being a newborn raccoon: “You can’t hear or see, and you are hungry.” With a sniff, wiggle and whine (all also shown being done by kids in the page margin), the adorable infant suckles milk from a happily smiling mother raccoon and grows until, “After a few weeks, your ears open. Then your eyes.” And then raccoon training begins, as the mother raccoon guides the baby outside the den, shows how to find food, teaches hunting, and encourages play with her other growing babies – and, yet again, when the text says “jump, wrestle, chase,” there are pictures of smiling kids happily jumping, wrestling and chasing. The book takes the raccoon through its first winter and notes that when it is again spring, “You are an adult now, and you know how to survive on your own.” That specific sentence is not given a parallel with anything involving human children, but it does complete a nicely structured introduction to the birth and first year of a raccoon’s life, and once again, as with the bee book, shows the interesting if usually-invisible-to-humans events occurring in the natural world that people share with not-people.

     Both these books have some helpful back-of-the-book material that goes beyond the basic stories. These include “fun facts” (plus, in the bee book, a glossary); a section on why honey bees/raccoons are important; and a “how to help them” final page. There is also a participatory activity in each book: “Be a Honey Bee!” and “Be a Raccoon!” Each gives a bit of additional information and then encourages kids to behave as a bee or raccoon would – for instance, by hiding something and then trying to do a bee-like wiggle dance to explain to someone where the hidden object is. Just informative enough for the youngest readers and just full enough of enjoyable pictures and ideas to balance the factual information, these Meet Your World books really do serve as age-appropriate introductions to critters that are quite as remarkable as exotic ones even though they are decidedly more often seen.