Turtle in July

It's a list of poems from the point of view of various animals as the year progresses. Every season has a poem from the bullhead fish, because they are the most important fish. At a certain point, it's just like, "Okay, enough. Enough poems. Oh my god, enough." And they get really repetitive. It's interesting, and they're definitely different styles based on the different animals, but poems like the one from the deer mouse are really annoying. "Get get get get get get out of the nest get into the cold get get get get get food lots of food." It's like, okay, I get it. That's kind of how you would expect a mouse to talk. And the bear talks like, "Who I? Where I?" So mice are hyperactive, bears are stupid, warblers are extremely repetitive, rattlesnakes talk like Yoda, and the bullheads... enough with the bullheads. Every season, it's like, "Oh god, they're back." Here's the bullheads in spring. Here's the bullheads in summer. Here they are in autumn. Enough. Enough stupid fish. I don't care about the stupid fish. I just got really sick of this book. By the third poem, I was just done.

They're well-written, they're just so wordy and written in a way that my brain does not want to think. The illustrations are kind of cool. But I can't imagine children thinking that this was terribly interesting, either. I was bored. It was very evocative of the different animals, but it just went on too long. This book should have been much shorter, and it really was fairly short to begin with.