Crossings: Extraordinary Structures for Extraordinary Animals

Directional concepts get an ecological twist in this book celebrating passages engineered for wildlife in habitats disrupted by human development. “A bull elk picks his way through evergreens OVER a noisy Canadian highway.// A mama elephant thunders UNDER a crowded Kenyan road.” Each animal and its human-constructed crossing receives a dedicated spread, calling out how it moves over, under, across, or through, while a small caption offers additional details: “The Trans-Canada Highway is home to more than forty wildlife overpasses and underpasses.” Though Duffield rightly lauds human ingenuity in aiding animals (“Opening their minds and their hearts, they work to find ideas, answers”) the book only indirectly catalogs the irrevocable ways that human development disrupts habitats. With an appealing softness, Orodán’s pencil illustrations, finished in Photoshop, use light and shadow to show the constructed passages’ depth. A picture book for the Anthropocene. Ages 3–8. [em](Oct.) [/em]