OVER AND UNDER THE WETLAND

Swamps can be subtly spectacular, if you know where to look and what to see.

This addition to Messner’s and Neal’s successful Over and Under series sees readers through the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Florida. Dark-haired “Grandma” and a skirt-wearing child “wander, through curtains of green,” on a boardwalk. What lives in the subtropical wilderness beneath and above them? Many, many animals populate this “secret kingdom”: a barred owl and pig frog; a painted bunting, red-bellied woodpecker, and red-shouldered hawk (one page is devoted to their various sounds); a black-crowned night heron, banded water snake, and cottonmouth; a dazzling white egret, and roseate spoonbills eating small fry; a swamp lily and red-bellied turtle, the latter immediately snapped up in the jaws of an alligator; a strangler fig hugging a cypress; a raccoon family; a swallow-tailed kite and mosquito fish; anhinga, Florida panther, ghost orchid, and sphinx moth. The pages that follow provide detailed information on the habits, appearance, features, and contributions of each named member of the ecosystem, as well as additional information about the specific sanctuary depicted. Neal’s delicate, colorful, and accurate mixed-media art invites readers to linger. The images, without lines or shadows, bring the hidden wetland world right before readers’ eyes.

A quiet and beautiful celebration of an elusive, underappreciated, and often threatened natural resource.