Children's books: Animals: "Tully the Tadpole", "Do Newts Eat Noodles?", and "Lucas the Spy Cat"

Tully the Tadpole by A.M. Ruggirello, illustrated by Alexis Madau (Cardboard Monet Publishing)
Do Newts Eat Noodles? by Cliff Beneventi, illustrated by Oana Cocheci (independently published)
Lucas the Spy Cat by Samantha Shannon, illustrated by Lei Yang (Rawlings Books)

Back into the world of children's books...this time with animals!

Tully the Tadpole
In Tully the Tadpole, Tully sees all the other tadpoles changing shape into something else...but Tully's not so sure that that's the only option for the future.

Simple but lush illustrations punctuate this rhyming tale-about-a-tail (or something like that) as Tully accepts that, sometimes...a tadpole is just different, and that's okay. It's a wonderfully versatile story: Tully is different from the other tadpoles, but how that difference corresponds to human differences is largely up to the reader's imagination. This could be a story about gender, or about disability, or about something else entirely—the bigger point is that Tully never loses sight of who Tully is. A lovely, understated story for young readers.

Do Newts Eat Noodles?
Do newts eat noodles?
Do lions eat lemons?
Do iguanas eat ice cream?

This alphabet book won't answer those questions, but it will give you (wait for it) plenty of food for thought. The format is very simple (same question repeated for different animals and types of food), but the illustrations are clean and playful, and I particularly appreciated the focus on less common animals—we have lions and elephants, yes, but also jellyfish and otters and (of course) newts. And umbrellabirds! Today I learned that umbrellabirds exist.

Overall, a fun twist on a classic style and a good fit for the pre-kindergarten crowd.

Lucas the Spy Cat
Do you know what your cat gets up to at night...? In Lucas the Spy Cat, the narrators set out to learn just that—with unexpected results. (After all, you can't expect a cat to give up all its secrets!)

The story's strength is in its imagination—it's a chance for kids to let personification run rampant and dream up nighttime scenarios of their own for beloved pets. The rhymes are sometimes rather forced, and I think I would have preferred the story to break out of the rhyming constraint altogether, but the games at the end are a fun addition; there's enough variety for kids to pick whatever interests them most. (There's also plenty of detail in the illustrations to keep kids busy looking for new finds.) I could imagine this as a series, with Lucas getting up to different secret adventures each book.

Thanks to the authors and publishers for providing review copies through NetGalley.