★★★★☆ Don't Trust Fish, by Neil Sharpson, Dan Santat (llustrator)
This book kind of has a point...
Don’t Trust Fish
Neil Sharpson, Dan Santat (llustrator)
This book kind of has a point...
Neil Sharpson and Dan Santat‘s Don’t Trust Fish is a picture book about why fish should not be trusted. It’s funny, and if you like picture books at all or have a preschooler who does, you should definitely read it. It begins by telling you how to identify mammals, reptiles, and birds. These are straightforward. Then comes this
Fish don’t follow any rules. Some of them have gills.
Some live in salt water.
Some live in fresh water.
Some have lungs.
They are rebels and outlaws.
DON’T TRUST FISH.
...accompanied by Santat‘s illustrations of these variations.
I am in the first category -- my preschool days are almost 70 years behind me. I am also, as it happens, a retired biology professor, so I was delighted to recognize that Sharpson is making a valid point here.
Fish don’t exist. OK, that’s an overstatement. What I mean is that, according to the strictest and most rational discipline (cladistics) for classifying living creatures, “fish” are not a valid group.
Now is where I get more technical than many (probably most) of you want in a review of a picture book for preschoolers. The central idea of cladistics is that, since all living things evolved from a single long-ago ancestor, we should understand their relationships according to their ancestry. What that means is that animals should be classified into groups that share a common ancestor. That is, all mammals are the descendants of an animal that lived in the time of the dinosaurs. Every descendant now alive of that long-ago Ur-mammal is a mammal, and every mammal is a descendant of that long-ago Ur-mammal.
I think this makes perfect sense. Now, some of the groups of animals we ordinarily recognize are not all and every descendant of a single ancestor. Reptiles are not quite. Every reptile is a descendant of a single common ancestor, but not every descendant of that ancestor is a reptile. Birds are also descendants of the common ancestor of the reptiles. But honestly, reptiles come close to being a valid group.
Fish do not. Cladistically, fish are a mess. The group we call “fish” is a big jumble of animals from a bunch of different lineages.
From there Sharpson and Santat spin out an elaborate conspiracy theory about the ways that fish plan to take over the world, or something. Their plans and goals are not entirely clear, because fish are devious.
It’s a lot of fun. Read it!