Prickly and Poisonous : The Deadly Defenses of Nature's Strangest Animals and Plants

by Anita Ganeri

Examines how various animals, fish, birds, insects, and different plants protect themselves from danger

Genres: Nonfiction, Childrens

45 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Anita Ganeri is a highly experienced author of children’s information books, specialising in religion, India/Asia, multiculturalism, geography, biography and natural history. She became a freelance writer after working at Walker Books (as foreign rights manager) and Usborne Publishing (as an editor). Since then, she has written over 300 titles, including the best-selling Horrible Geography series for Scholastic. The series won the Geographical Association Silver Award in 1999 and was cited as being ‘an innovation that all geographers will applaud’. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society where she conducts most of her research for the books.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really do wish that I could give Anita Ganeri a full five stars for her really and mostly excellent 1995 non fiction picture book Prickly and Poisonous. For yes, Ganeri's featured text for Prickly and Poisonous, it is wonderfully educational, informative (without ever becoming overwhelming or too convoluted, and with Ganeri also refraining from using either scientific genre or artificial attempts at humour) . And very much happily, with Prickly and Poisonous, Anita Ganeri fortunately also presents the stinging and venomous animals, plants and mushrooms (fungi) she is textually featuring without any kind of author criticism about them being toxic (and sometimes in fact lethally so), stingingly prickly and sometimes even a combination of both, but instead with Anita Ganeri always in Prickly and Poisonous demonstrating that toxicity, nettles, stinging tentacles etc. are not present for some kind of inherent nastiness or evil but mostly for protection from possible predators or for hunting, for catching and obtaining necessary food (and that very often, when people are bitten by venomous snakes and other venomous animals, they had been either disturbing and/or harassing the animals in question or have somehow inadvertently startled or frightened them).

Now with regard to the intended audience for Prickly and Poisonous, while I would personally consider Anita Ganeri’s presented text most suitable for young readers from about the age of eight to ten or eleven, I do think that if Prickly and Poisonous were to be read aloud, even considerably younger children with an interest in wildlife and potentially dangerous animals and plants would probably enjoy Prickly and Poisonous, since yes, all of the animals, plants and mushrooms featured are also accompanied by bright and realistic full-colour illustrations, and that with the chapters, dividing Prickly and Poisonous into short, manageable chunks, using Prickly and Poisonous with younger children should probably be quite easy. And indeed, the only reason why I will not be rating Prickly and Poisonous with five stars is that I do from an academic point of view need to take off one star for Anita Ganeri not including a bibliography in this otherwise totally excellent book (and that I also do not really understand why a densely informative zoology and also ecology based picture book like Prickly and Poisonous does not included any secondary sources, has no bibliographical materials whatsoever).

[Cyndi Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is super interesting. My kids like it learn about weird animals and the things they can do.