Apes and Monkeys

My 2 year old daughter has had an obsession with apes and monkeys for some time now. She's become quite adept at identifying the various ones by name, and thoroughly enjoys a good picture book with a wide variety of species depicted in it. This little introductory guide absolutely fits the bill. The book covers a variety of common species: chimps, orangutans, bonobos, macaques, mandrills, spider monkeys, tamarins, capuchins, howler monkeys, colobus monkeys, the list goes on. It even includes the siamang gibbon which we have at the local zoo and incorrectly identified to her as a howler monkey on our first trip there (oops). The accompanying pictures for each animal are superb, and show these creatures in their natural habitats doing the natural things, eating, bathing, showing affection, nursing babies (this thrills my daughter, who still nurses), and of course - swinging from treetops. The text is brief, but each monkey on each page is identified in the text, and you can pretty quickly pick out the name and even some key facts when reading to a young child who doesn't have the attention span to listen to a couple paragraphs of information on each species. Each page is nicely laid out, with a couple of photos and one main blurb; the pages aren't oversaturated with boxes containing random facts and such, like so many similar books, that just end up with cluttered pages and a hard-to-follow train of thought that makes reading aloud a chore. This book is very straightforward in pictures and text and as my daughter gets older and becomes more interested in specific facts on each species, it will be an easy read-aloud book because of its simple intuitive layout. The end of a the book contains a few little at-home projects including making a monkey chain from paper plates, monkey masks, and making your own termite mound from papier mache, which is a little advanced for where we're at, but it's still a neat aside. If you have a child who loves monkeys and needs good all-around book, this one should certainly appease that interest in children from about 2-6. It's the best I've come across in the category. I'm glad we lucked out when buying this, and I actually look forward to the many repeat-reads of it in the coming months.