While I don’t often receive many books for children and young adults for review, these past few weeks have been quite the exception; thus I’m devoting this week to sharing a few of the new ones that have particularly caught my eye.
The first of these (with a significant caveat to which I’ll return in a moment) is Hawk Ridge; Minnesota’s Birds of Prey. Written by Laura Erickson and illustrated by Betsy Bowen, Hawk Ridge is actually not, despite its over-sized horizontal format and colorful illustrations, specifically a book for children (although any who are interested in birds would likely find it appealing); there’s simply too much text written – even at a cursory glance – at too high a reading level for it to be. Yet if it was intended as a book for adults, well… the visual cues are a bit contradictory.
In all honesty, at present its intended audience is still a bit of a conundrum. However knowing and respecting its author’s previous work as I do, I’m not going to let these formal incongruities get in the way of considering its contents on their own merits. Thus once I’ve given it a thorough read-through and spent a bit more time pondering it as a whole, I’ll certainly take it up in a future full review.
Follow-up: a representative from the University of Minnesota press has assured me that the book is intended as a gift-type book for adults with an interest in birds.
