Fun and informative essays about authors enjoying their broad range of pets. And how these pets provide calm, love, adventure and inspiration.

Good read.

Learned some interesting facts about these pet-loving writers! The bright, sweet illustrations add to the pleasing overall format. It includes a contents page, introduction, interesting sidebars (for most, but not all authors—odd), glossary (wish they had highlighted those words in the text), bibliography, citations, and index: all these extras made this librarian's heart happy! I LOVE that the text is full of words my 4th and 5th graders might not know but could get from context (a vocabulary plus!). My only concern is that a few facts might upset kids in an otherwise whimsical book, such as Virginia Woolf's suicide and the statement that Hemingway "seemed to be around animals mostly in order to kill them." The cover is going to draw some younger readers who aren't ready to know things like that. However, even the more unpleasant parts of these writers' lives are stated in a straightforward way (no gory details), so that helps. I'm adding this quirky book to our school library. ( )