Children of Summer: Henri Fabre's Insects

Grade 4-6. Paul, 10, is fascinated by insects, an interest engendered by his father, Henri Fabre, who has studied the creatures for most of his life. The boy and his two younger sisters help Pere gather material for a textbook, often accompanying him on field trips into their untamed backyard. Children of Summer briefly describes over a dozen of their scientific adventures from altering the path of a group of pine caterpillars, to studying the behavior of undertaker beetles and ground wasps. There is much that is admirable in this slim title. The text is clearly written and the material on insect behavior is intriguing, particularly the responses of various species to the experiments. Soft pen-and-pencil drawings of the family and the small creatures they study, plus the occasional silhouette, evoke the book's 19th-century French setting. Henri Fabre's voice dominates the narrative; Paul merely passes on his father's observations and findings. Indeed, several of the short chapters included are straight reminiscences of the man's childhood?e.g., how Henri taught himself to read and how his duck-herding activities inspired his love of nature. In the original works on which this title is based, the 10 volume Souvenirs Entomologiques, Fabre himself spoke directly to his readers in a charming, if verbose style. Anderson's book will nonetheless appeal to serious young naturalists curious about the work of a famous and idiosyncratic scientist.?Karey Wehner, San Francisco Public Library
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A fictionalized look at the work of entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, as seen through the eyes of his 10-year-old son, Paul. Working largely in the fields around his French home, and often with the help of his children, Fabre (d. 1915) pioneered the study of insect behavior; Anderson (Food Chains, 1991, etc.) sketches the scientist's career and introduces a gallery of his multilegged subjects. With chatty enthusiasm, Paul describes his father's simple maneuvers, e.g., pinning a ball of dung to the ground to see how dung beetles go about freeing it, and observations, capturing the excitement of waking to a house full of giant male peacock moths drawn by a newly hatched female caged in the study, gamely sitting down to a meal of cooked cossus grubs, considered a delicacy by the ancient Romans, or pausing to hear an anecdote from his father's youth. The incidents are all true, recast from Fabre's books for adults and arranged in short, easy-to-absorb chapters; young naturalists charmed by these glimpses into a lilliputian world will want to sample Fabre's own accounts. (b&w illustrations, index, not seen, map, glossary) (Fiction. 10-12) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 4^-7. Imagine having a father who is known as a hermit, accused of being a poacher, and thought to be strange and simpleminded. According to this fictionalized story, French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, a contemporary and correspondent of Darwin and a friend of John Stuart Mill, may have been such a man. Using the voice of Fabre's 10-year-old son Paul, who, according to Fabre's own writings, often helped his father, Anderson tells of Fabre's passion for learning about cicadas, scorpions, and the other "children of summer." The man's curious behavior will draw readers in, and the descriptions of the oddities of the insect world will keep them interested: children are bound to remember Fabre's shooting a cannon to test cicadas' hearing and the family's eating a meal of cossus grubs. Although this is fiction, not science how-to, the book may, perhaps, inspire some unusual science projects about insect behavior. Karen Morgan