“Creatures of the Desert World” features a similar set of animals, but presented in a truly amazing pop-up/action format. When you pull on something, it doesn’t just slide in the direction you’re pulling. Instead, the animals jump, pounce, and flap in surprisingly creative ways. At this point, I think we’ve found every little lizard, pocket mouse, and snake that there is to find, but for a long time we’d discover something new during each reading. Some of our favorite features are the cacti that stand a good 8 inches high off the page, a pack rat that scurries into a nest that’s viewable only by opening a secret door in a cactus, baby wrens nestled that can be seen through the window in the cactus spines, and peccaries that you can barely see peeking out of the sand.

We have lots of books featuring photos of animals and a great many more with animals that are so anthropomorphized that they’re unrecognizable (um, Arthur is an anteater). This is one of the few books we have with realistic, artistic portrayals of animals in their natural habitats. The illustrations are lovely, and I get a kick out of the fact that the book had an illustrator (Barbara Gibson), an Art Director (Jody Bolt), and two Paper Engineers (John Strejan and James Roger Diaz).

My mother-in-law gave this book to Zadie when she was only 6 months old, and I remember thinking that it would be years before she’d be able to understand that some books need to be handled with care. But she’s an unusually gentle kid (and unusually smart, but whose kid isn’t?) so we pulled this book off the shelves several months ago and it has been a staple ever since. But parents of spastic rippers should probably keep this on a high shelf until their children go to college.