A Woolly Mammoth Journey - Softcover

Debbie S. Miller is the author of several picture books including A Polar Bear Journey, one of Booklist's Top Ten Animal Books for Youth. Jon Van Zyle is an artist whose illustrations appear in A Polar Bear Journey and Raven and River.

Gr 1-4-This hypothetical story of a woolly mammoth family's summer travels springs from a modern incident in which a child discovered a tusk in Alaska. In a scheme familiar in fictionalized introductions to real animals, Miller names some of the animals, focusing on two particular family members. Wise One is the matriarch, and Little One her newest grandchild. Well structured to convey the impressive bodies and probable social behavior of these early cousins of the elephant, the text occasionally lapses into anthropomorphism. After a young bull dies in a nasty fall, "The trunks of many mammoths will stroke the bones and tusks-as though his spirit is always present." Van Zyle's acrylic double-spread views convey a good sense of the creatures' woolly bodies, the late Ice Age terrain, and the other herbivorous and predatory animals sharing the habitat. Even humans make a brief appearance in the guise of nomadic hunters. A concluding page provides added facts about physical characteristics, the range and habitat of mammoths, and comments on their extinction. Concentrating on the animals' life in the wild, this book complements Aliki's Wild and Woolly Mammoths (HarperCollins, 1998), which offers much more information about human hunting techniques and use of mammals.

Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston

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