The Life Cycle of a Kangaroo, Vol. 2 Book

Simple text and photographs present the life cycle of the kangaroo.

Claudia Mills - Children's Literature

In each slim, small volume of the "Life Cycles" series, from Pebble Books, emerging readers learn the basics of the featured animal's life cycle, from birth to reproduction. Left-hand pages show color photos of each stage of the life cycle, while right-hand pages give a brief and simple explanation (the entire text of the 24-page book contains a mere 155 words). "A kangaroo beings life as a pouch young. A pouch young looks like a tiny worm"-which, in the photo on the facing page, indeed it does. For the first few months of its life, "The pouch young lives inside its mother's pouch. It drinks milk from her body." After five months, the pouch young becomes the more familiar joey, poking its head out of its mother's pouch. While we are told that "A female kangaroo mates with a male kangaroo," the mating itself is not photographically depicted, nor is the actual birth of a new pouch young. The book closes with a section on "words to know" (written at a higher and more detailed level than the initial text), a bibliography for further reading, Internet sites to visit, and index. Because the kangaroo's life cycle is so different from that of most mammals (we learn in the "Words to Know" section that a newborn pouch young is only the size of a jellybean!-and how exactly does it nurse within its mother's pouch?), more detail would have been welcome. But the book gives a fascinating glimpse of the kangaroo's life cycle within its series format. 2003, Pebble Books/Capstone,