REVIEW: Cute Animals That Could Kill You Dead (nonfiction picture book) words by Brooke Hartman, pictures by María Garcia

Cute Animals That Could Kill You Dead is a children's nonfiction picture book. I bought my copy new.

Review:

This covers a lot more animals than I expected, giving each one two pages, the first of which provides some basic information and the animal's "cuteness factor," and the second of which explains what they can do that makes them so fearsome and/or deadly. The animals covered include: Tarsier, Slow Loris, Grasshopper Mouse, Hedgehog, Northern Pygmy Owl, Bumblebee Bat, Sea Otter, Platypus, Ladybug, Jumping Spider, Bottlenose Dolphin, Sea Bunny, Poison Dart Frog, Flying Gecko, Black-footed Cat, Fennec Fox, and Honey Badger.

If you interpret the "you" in the title to mean "you, the reader" the way I did, the title of this book is pretty deceiving. Many (most?) of the animals mentioned would have difficulty killing a human, whether they were a child or an adult. A bumblebee bat (Kitti's hog-nosed bat) is deadly towards flies (gobbling up as many as 4000 insects in less than an hour is impressive), and you wouldn't want to be an aphid around a ladybug, but the average reader would be just fine. 

The stylized cute vs. fierce illustrations were okay, but I was really glad that the last couple pages included photographs of each of the animals.