Very informative. I was so excited to see so many pictures of real beavers! Illustrations are great, but there seem to be less and less children's animal nonfiction with photographs.

Beavers: Radical Rodents and Ecosystem Engineers by Frances Backhouse is not a book for young readers. This book is chock full of facts, information and wonderful images. If you want to learn about beavers, their habitats, habits, family life, dangers, and conservation, then pick this book up. For my granddaughter, we looked at the images and read the captions. For a five year old, that was plenty. The eight year old wanted more, so we read some of the sections titled Beaver Backers that shared about how to help the beaver and its conservation. As an adult, I read the whole book and learned a lot about beavers, especially their comeback. This is an educational book that would be a great addition to public, school and classroom libraries. It is geared to older students (ten and up) but could be used with younger students sharing some of the information available.

An educational book that is a pleasure to read. Any reader will learn while reading but also enjoy what is found on the pages. It would be a fabulous book for older elementary/middle school students but also valuable for teenagers and adults.
The book is divided up into chapters that include so much information about this interesting creature. Plus it is full of bright colourful pictures to help give the reader a better understanding.
This book would be a wonderful addition to a school classroom or library as well as a home school. Or even for general interest for animal and nature lovers! I recommend you add this book to your shelves!

Many thanks to Orca Book Publishers and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this great book!

Ya'll, this book was SO GOOD. Beavers are so darn CUTE, it's hard to do a bad book about them, and they are just so INTERESTING. At least, this book was just so immersive and educational about beavers and their place in the ecosystem and had really adorable pictures, I can see this being a HUGE hit for children, and adults, who are into learning about animals and nature.

I can't stress enough that the pictures in this book are SQUEE worthy, so be prepared. My heart almost couldn't take the cuteness overload!

Also, as is unfortunately the case with all animal/nature books, there is a LOT about how humans almost hunted the beaver to extinction. Necessary to teach, learn and never repeat again (too late for many animals...sigh), but SO hard to read about.

BUT, they also include what WE can do, on a personal small scale and on a larger scale, to help humans and beavers to get along. There are some really amazing examples of it in the book, especially when beavers moved into an area occupied by humans, they caused a bit of a ruckus, and the local government decide to exterminate the beavers, civilians took a stand and the beavers now co-exist with the humans around them. YAY COMPASSION FOR THE WIN!

This book is one I would HIGHLY recommend for maybe middle readers on up, especially if they love animals/nature, and for adults who have beavers as neighbors and want to peacefully co-exist with them, rather than have them exterminated. Lots of helpful tools on how to learn more in-depth about beavers, to understand what drives them to do what they do and how to live peacefully with them.

5, beavers are a cornerstone species and just TOO CUTE, stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Orca Book Publishers for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

Informative, educational and interesting. Reminds me of books I used to read as a young student in science class, they were part of a series on animals and other natural characters/figures. Good for a classroom