Review Detail

AS LARGE AS LIFE is an interesting collection of animals and habitats in a beautifully oversized book. The illustrations here are really cool, with plenty of color and a large diversity of animals pictured. While some facts are about the size of the animal, others are random facts. The end includes a fold-out page featuring some of the animals shown in scale to each other and a person.

What I loved: The illustrations here are really vivid and colorful, and I loved just looking through them. The facts are also intriguing, and I particularly enjoyed the size-related facts that bring to life how large (or small) some animals are. Other facts add to the fun of reading, and the inclusion of different habitats was also interesting. The fold-out at the end was really cool to look at, and it's so interesting to see how very big some animals (whales) are!

What left me wanting more: It was not entirely clear to me how the scaling was done on the inner pages, and so we don't get all those cool size facts I was expecting. Other random facts were cool, but they are given in short sentences, so they also did not include a lot of detail or information. This was more of a book to browse than to really get into and learn from. The categories also seemed a bit randomly gathered, as there's not a clear theme to the organization, but still interesting to look through.

Final verdict: AS LARGE AS LIFE is an intriguing book about animal size with a large diversity of animals and bugs pictured in vivid detail. Would recommend for older elementary school aged readers who love to get quick facts about animals.