Dingo by Claire Saxby

Ill. by Tannya Harricks. Nature Storybooks. Walker Books Australia, 2018. ISBN 9781925381283
(Age: 5+) Highly recommended. Subjects: Dingoes, Australian animals. Author Claire Saxby's Dingo is her fourth beautifully crafted picture book in the award-winning Nature Storybooks series from Walker Books. Dingo's familiar two layered text includes her emotional, sensory narrative and her expository writing explores the lives of a mother dingo's life with her nine-week old pups. Each is delineated by a distinctive font allowing the reading audience to interact and engage with both the story and the information.
Can you see her? From this first sentence, the world of the mother dingo unfolds. With alliterative phrasing and sensory expressions - pointed ears twitching, her nose snuffing and tawny eyes flashing Saxby brings the dingo to life, while the factual text is written in an easy to read style with information accessible for younger learners as well.
Mother dingo leaves her den at dusk in search of food for her newly weaned pups. She passes a mob of kangaroos grazing, then climbs to the highest rocks, snuffing into the wind, her sense of smell up to a hundred times better than humans. The night is young and there is hunting to be done.
Award-winning visual artist Tannya Harricks captures the natural beauty of the Australian landscape and the wild dingo's habitat with her expressive oil painting illustrations. The bold broad brush strokes and richly layered colour palette seamlessly bring Saxby's descriptions to life.
Dingo is both an entertaining and informative non-fiction narrative exploring the life cycle, diet, habitat, natural adaptations of this top-order predator. This is an excellent resource suitable for Early Years' students researching STEM and HASS topics and for writing information reports.
Rhyllis Bignell