Secrets of the Rainforest: A Shine-a-Light Book
by Carron Brown; illus. by Alyssa Nassner
Preschool, Primary     Kane Miller     40 pp.
3/15     978-161067-325-9     $12.99

In Nassner’s eye-catching illustrations, the lush foliage of a tropical rainforest, filled with abstract, bright-green leaves and brown branches and trunks, hides a host of living organisms. To find out what kinds of animals live in this (unspecified) tropical rainforest and how they interact with the plants in the ecosystem, young readers can first respond to the text’s questions (“What’s hiding under this leaf?”) with their predictions, then hold up the book to a light source to see an animal’s image projected through onto the full-color illustration on each right-facing page. Turn the page, and those black-and-white illustrations on the back side also stand alone, each containing an additional factual sentence or two (“A beautiful butterfly is resting. His open wings are larger than both your hands put together”). The animals are presented in a progression from the upper canopy to the rainforest floor, including hummingbirds and spiders, jaguars and sloths, ants and snakes, and even a river dolphin. Some of the terminology used is very general (butterflies, beetles — no specific species are mentioned), but the book succeeds at providing an overall sense of the teeming life of a rainforest.

From the July/August 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.