The Brave Little Turtle

The Brave Little Turtle, written and illustrated by Gill McBarnet, chronicles the adventures of a green turtle named Nani and her brother, Lono. Loni gets entangled in plastic debris, which tightens around his neck. All the other sea creatures fail in their attempts to remove the plastic. Can Nani overcome her shyness and find a way to help Lono? This is a cute story, and plastic in our oceans is a terrible scourge. On the back cover of this hardback book, the author includes six "factoid" boxes on green turtle nesting, temperature dependent sex selection, diet, and more. There's also a note that "If you come across a turtle in distress in Hawaii, please dial '0' and ask for 'Enterprise 5469'. A Conservation Enforcement Officer will help you." Besides receiving a charge for dialing '0', I suspect this phone number is no longer in existence! Obviously, green turtles don't play in pounding surf. And they probably don't dive deeper than 400 meters. I am surprised there is no mention of the Hawaiian word for the green turtle ("honu"). And I didn't especially like the illustrations of the heads of sea turtles... they almost seem "erased" compared to the detail in the rest of the body. So the focus of this book really is to get kids to appreciate green turtles (and hopefully, other ocean creatures) while discouraging the dumping of plastic. Yeah!