Lizards for Lunch: A Roadrunner's Tale

Rating:
Summary: Lizards for Lunch: A Roadrunner's Tale
Review: My kids (3 and 5) love this book! They don't have many other books that make them laugh so consistently (and teach them wonderful things at the same time). Storad and Atwood have hit upon a great combination of entertainment and education where the desert is concerned!

Rating:
Summary: A Great New Science Book
Review: Told in rhythmic verse and containing wonderful water color illustrations of desert nature scenes, this book introduces many facts about roadrunners in a way that children will love and not soon forget. My 8-year old loves this book, and so do I!

Rating:
Summary: odd, intense pictures, story does not track
Review: We sure are sorry to write a less than thrilled review for a book that looked and sounded so good. Our 3-year old daughter was really looking forward to receiving this book and, possibly, taking it to share with her class for "desert" week. We love roadrunners; she's had a stuffed one from a trip to AZ since she was less than a year old.

This book was so disappointing. The photos are scary on a majority of pages: boldly colored, large, wide-open mouthed roadrunners with bugged eyes chasing wildly after bugs and lizards. The story itself is about roadrunners often settling for non-lizard meals, but craving and madly pursuing lizards to eat.

Theme aside, the story itself could track so much better from page spread to page spread. The authors tried to do too much. The theme of roadrunners hotly pursuing frightened lizards and bugs to eat is interrupted with pages here and there about the physical description and vocalizations of roadrunners. The result is a badly disjointed story line. Even the "chorus" does not flow with rhymes on preceding or subsequent page spreads.

We did like the rhymes in the book, but they are almost entirely overshadowed by the poor flow of the story and the frightening pictures. The book is absolutely not worth purchasing for the rhymes alone (they are not that consisent or good). The book could be so much better if it either stuck only to the theme of "what roadrunners eat" OR (in our opinion a better choice) "all about roadrunners".