What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? is a 2003 picture book by Steven Jenkins and Robin Page, a husband and wife team who create children’s books together, or did until Jenkins died in 2013.
They are known for books about nature and science featuring skillful, vivid illustrations, and that definitely describes What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?
After an introductory spread with a large fish face on one page and a block of text on the next, the book follows an engaging pattern. There’s a two-page spread with a question about one element of an animal, and images of five examples of that element. So, the first question is “What do you do with a nose like this?” accompanied by five very different noses. The next two-page spread shows the five animals whose noses we’d glimpsed earlier. Each gets a line of explanation. For example, “If you’re a platypus, you use your nose to dig in the mud.”
We get ears, tails, eyes, feet, and mouths, each with five examples, each with five animals the examples belong to. These creatures are engagingly positioned, often placed on the page in ways that underscore the animal’s special characteristics. For example, the gecko is upside down at the top of the page, because it can walk on ceilings with its sticky feet.
Kids will have to pay attention to all directions, and each spread with the question on it is a chance for them to pause and wonder what animal eats with this mouth, which one walks with those feet, and so on.
At the end of the book, each creature gets a paragraph of further explanation, and a parent or teacher who wants to be prepared might read these four pages first.
A very fine book. I was left with a few questions (How does the horned lizard shoot blood from its eyes? Why start by asking about tails in the title when they don’t come first?), but no complaints. Very good stuff. It is easy to see why this was a Caldecott Honor Book.
