A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS

Readers learn the collective nouns for groups of animals in this picture book.

Rollicking rhymes introduce each group: “A parliament of owls was the first to arrive. / They perched in a tree up high. / A tower of giraffes glided in next, / their heads nearly touching the sky.” A light-skinned child with a cloud of red hair sits in a tree clutching a camera, but readers will only learn the reason for the gathering at the end. Animals from all habitats, from earth, sky, and water, all answer the call of this child: a prickle of porcupines, a barrel of monkeys, a cauldron of bats, a raft of otters, a rhumba of rattlesnakes, a shiver of sharks, and even a culture of bacteria are among them. And what to call this final huge group of diverse animals? The child has the perfect collective noun. The jaunty rhymes briefly lose their way, turning more toward a list and losing a bit of the bouncy rhythm. The cartoon animals ham it up, many times exhibiting anthropomorphic behavior (one crow surveys the reader murderously, some pandas walk on two legs, and the dazzle of zebras almost look like they are in a conga line). While unrealistic in the animal world, the ending could speak to an ideal for the human world to aspire to, especially in our current times. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

As colorful and raucous a collection of animals as ever was.