The World's Most Ridiculous Animals - Philip Bunting

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Author: Philip Bunting

Genre: Children's nonfiction, Animals.
Rating: 4 stars.

A fun and informative book but older children will be able to appreciate it better than its intended target readership.

As the title suggests, the book contains a compilation of various “ridiculous” animals. The reason why they are put in this ignominious category ranges from their appearance to their eating habits to even their strange behaviour. A wide range of animals, birds, fish, and insects is covered, and the information provided for each of the entries is, at the same time, hilarious and mindboggling.

Each page has a bright and funny illustration of the specific animal. There are cheeky labels surrounding the drawing, tagging its various body parts with quirky comments. There’s relatively more sober text detailing the animal’s evolutionary information and extraordinary characteristics. At the top of the page, the content also mentions the animal’s common name, its Latin biological name (which is struck through) and a substitute funny name that apparently suits it better. For instance, an okapi is a “fancypantseum stinkyhoof” while a common wombat is a “cubus poopus.”

There are a few reasons why I am not going higher in my rating.
👉 Amazon shows the reading age as 5-8 years but I don’t think readers of that age group will understand the puns and “dad jokes” scattered throughout the content. Children aged 10+ might be a better target.
👉 There are quite a few tough words, so younger readers might need a lot of assistance from knowledgeable adults (or the internet).
👉 The strikethrough is overused. I liked its usage as a substitute of the Latin name but when it comes in the content too, it gets very repetitive and even irritating.
👉 I feel like it missed on a few opportunities to provide explanations. Like, why is a secretary bird called a secretary bird? Does the hairy anglerfish actually have hair?
👉 One instance where I wasn’t satisfied with the illustrations and felt like looking up the images of all the creatures mentioned. The sketches are quite cute and quirky, but they don’t match up to the actual photos, especially as a lot of the “ridiculous” content is based on the appearance of the animals, and the illustrations don’t cover this angle accurately,

However, this would be a wonderful book for animal lovers aged upper tween and above. Substantiate the info in the book with googled photos of the animals and you will be able to appreciate the amazing features of those animals a lot better. It’s an informative collection of animal trivia and offers a fun way of knowing more about some “ridiculous” animals on our planet. The book did miss out on the most ridiculous one – the ‘homo not-so-sapiens’.

My thanks to Quarto Publishing Group and NetGalley for the DRC of “The World's Most Ridiculous Animals”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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