Now there’s a title!
Actually, to be fair, I need to include the subtitle. Toes, Teeth, and Tentacles: A Curious Counting Book is a 2025 picture book by Steve Jenkins and Robin Page. As that subtitle indicates, this is a counting book. As the main title suggests, this is a fun book, a nonfiction book, and a book focused on the natural world, specifically animals of all kinds.
This starts with an overview about variety in the natural world, then walks readers through numbers 1-10, then to “bigger numbers” (12-26), and “even bigger numbers” (skipping in larger increments from 90 up to around 3000).
For numbers 1-10, the authors give animal images and facts related to that number. For example, the anglerfish appears with number 1, because it has a single”glowing spine”–but so does the praying mantis, with its single ear. The five-lined skink starts the examples for number 5, and the ninespine stickleback opens the discussion of number 9, both for obvious reasons.
The examples for the “even bigger numbers” get more approximate, with lines like “as many as three thousand eggs” (for the black-eyed squid) and “up to eighteen thousand” teeth for the giant African land snail, but that’s okay. Some of the numbers along the way are a bit squishy. For example, readers are told the ring-tailed lemur has “twenty-six black and white stripes” on its tail, but the National Zoo counts that as “13 alternating black and white bands.”
That’s a minor quibble. This book is a pleasure. It covers animals from the sky (like the pygmy owl) to the sea (like the stonefish), and gives examples from around the world. The images are colorful and engaging, and are positioned so as to draw attention to the specific element of the creature being counted. Each description of a creature both communicates wonder about the natural world and shares tasty facts.
Highly recommended. Good stuff.
