Puffins!

In a buoyant, species-focused picture book, Gianferrari (Rain and the Reading Horse) and Wicks (You and the Bowerbird) take readers on a comics-style trip to Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock Island. Matter-of-fact narration and digitally colored pencil-drawn panels portray a puffin colony that’s “as noisy as a city,” the air above dotted with onomatopoeic seabird cries. While lightly anthropomorphized puffins are endearingly portrayed—a heart pops between one pair’s striped orange beaks as they bond—the harsh realities of survival and puffin parenting come through clearly. Butterfish, too big for pufflings to manage, now dominate the warming waters where smaller, swallowable fish once thrived, and the gulls who share the island steal fish and, in one unflinching panel, even snatch a puffling from a burrow. But the primary family’s young puffin perseveres, and one starlit night while the gulls sleep, slips away, diving gracefully to join a raft of other puffins in “a floating city on the sea” before nature’s cycle begins anew. Honest, hopeful, and brimming with visual drama, this fondly rendered puffin primer offers budding naturalists an instantly accessible introduction to wildlife resilience. An afterword provides more detail about the birds. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Ammi-Joan Paquette, Aevitas Creative. Illustrator’s agent: Bernadette Baker-Baughman, Victoria Sanders & Assoc. (Apr.)