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Reviewed by: Taylor Coonelly, Elementary School Librarian Title: Bats Beneath the Bridge
Author: Janet Nolan
Illustrator: Emily Cox
Publisher: Albert Whitman
Year: 2024 Good for Grades: K-3 Genre/Type of Book: Animal
Content Warnings, or things that other School Librarians should be aware of: N/A
Recommended for a school library: No Reason(s) for choosing the book:
Nominated for the CYBILS award for Elementary and Middle Grade Nonfiction
If you were tasked by the publisher with writing a short quote for the back cover of this book, what would it be:
The story of how the largest urban bat colony in the world came to be.
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Review:
The story of how the largest urban bat colony in the world came to be.
One early spring in Austin, Texas, a bat found shelter in a small crevice of a closed down bridge. But as night fell, hundreds of bats flew out of the crevice into the night sky. Tens of thousands of bats began roosting in the Congress Ave Bridge, and people were scared and angry. They began to write letters to the paper, demanding the bats be removed. Hearing about the bridge, bat biologist Merlin Tuttle came to town, and advocated for the bats, claiming that the bats would help farmers due to their diet of plant-killing insects. As the debate continued between the humans, more and more bats moved in to the bridge. Slowly, as the bat population grew, more and more people began to fight for the bats to stay in the bridge, and watched their emergence each night. After over a million bats moved in, the community understood the positive impact the bats had on the environment, and welcomed them to the Congress Avenue Bridge.
While the story was an interesting one, the writing felt static and boring. It went from talking about the story of the Texas bats to then full pages about bat biology and back again, which felt a little confusing and took readers out of the story. I liked the illustrations in the story, though the people and the bats are illustrated in two different ways that makes the pictures feel a little disjointed.
While it is a true story and an interesting one at that, this book fell flat for me, and I wouldn't recommend it.
Number of party hats:
For more information about this book, see the Publisher's Website