An excellent set of stories with a target audience of 8 and up. I read it with seven 7-10 yr olds and each drew something different from the story BUT each was impressed with the information presented through the human/ animal interactions. It was a great reading experience that will be shared with other groups that I'm sure will appreciate it too.

I will be honest. I could not bring myself to finish this after the first two stories demonstrate behaviors on the parts of the humans that have a negative impact on wildlife & the habitat (blazing your own trail & leaving food out).

I have a bachelor's degree in wildlife biology & I'm a reptile enthusiast, so I was super interested in the concept of this and I'm incredibly disappointed. As a former wildlife educator & a former science teacher, I would never endorse this in a classroom or education environment.

1) the formatting does not follow the proper capitalization conventions for scientific names. Scientific names are made up of two parts - the genus & the specific epithet (sometimes shortened to just species but technically the species name is the combo of the genus & specific epithet). The genus should always be capitalized, the specific epithet should never be capitalized (even when it contains a name/proper noun that would otherwise be capitalized). - this may sound nit picky but considering the book's marketing is targeted at schools, libraries & other wildlife outreach organizations, it's important to get it right.
2) Rattlesnakes are venomous, not poisonous. See point 1 for why this bothers me.
3) the scientific name for the Arizona Black Rattlesnake is misspelled during the intro.
4) as previously mentioned, the first 2 stories exhibit behavior on the part of the humans that have a negative impact on wildlife & these actions (while common) are not examined deeper or revealed to be detrimental & they should be
5) we can absolutely talk about the delicate, almost magical feeling, balance of an ecosystem without talking about intelligent design
6) the vocabulary, narration & tone flops between stories for younger (6-10 year old) children & young teens. It doesn't make it feel cohesive & it feels as though it was written without a true concept for who the ideal audience is. I almost feel as though it would benefit from a complete rewrite while the author keeps their ideal audience in mind.
7) please communicate with an actual wildlife educator or outreach specialist before, during & after writing something like this - again, absolutely love the concept but the execution FLOPPED horribly.

As a science enthusiast with young nephews, I was excited to potentially have an age appropriate book that centers a reptile as the narrator & talks about our natural world, but ultimately I'm incredibly disappointed. I feel as though with my background & interests that I am the kind of person that they're attempting to market too - the concept, the name, the art, they all drew me in! - and it completely missed the mark.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A very lovely book for beginning readers about the natural world. I was a little annoyed with the use of poisonous instead of venomous quite early on in the book, though. Seems like such a rooky mistake.

Too, too busy. The book just meanders around a subject. I can't imagine a child finding it entertaining at all. Not a book I'd recommend. Sorry.

While I wish this well, I didn't engage with this book. It's a collection of short, short stories, all involving the snake narrator as he watches wildlife in an unnamed National Forest (just the fact it's a National Forest is enough, apparently, for I didn't know which quarter of the US it was in). He's near a cabin humans stay in, and no end of critters come through – birds, peccaries, a lost domesticated horse, and so on – and the snake tells us what happened with each inter-species encounter throughout a whole calendar year. But I didn't take to his style – one aspect of the book is it does not want to anthropomorphise any creature, to the extent the snake cannot call any animal by a name other than its type, so the grackle is not, say, Ginger, or Grackle, but Mr GTG, in honour of it being the great-tailed variety. I found such a shtick quite wearying.

I am sure some readers will enjoy the slightness of these quick tales, and not worry about how the snake narrates. If they share the same fauna as on these pages – I certainly don't here in the UK – they will have a further chance to appreciate this more. But to me it started off on a kind of worthy stance, and never really felt like something a younger me would have warmed to.

A worthy idea, but some of the vocabulary was a bit out-of-reach for children one the one hand, and maybe a bit too common on the other (i.e. discussion about mouse "poop"). Overall, the book seemed a bit old-fashioned and moralistic. The tone was off, somehow.

I really enjoyed the illustrations and the premise of the book which is respecting nature and wildlife. The inclusion of the scientific names thrilled my taxonomy-loving heart. And the rattlesnake narrator was entertaining for the most part.
However, much of the book felt unnecessarily dramatized and a bit too long to keep the attention of children. Some verbiage was overused, such as “FYI.”