Good Eating: The Short Life of Krill

2022 Cybils Award WINNER for Elementary Nonfiction!!!

NYPL best books of 2022

California Eureka Silver Honoree award 2022

"To my delight, your average krill is a far stranger story of metamorphosis than anything our butterflies can come up with." - Elizabeth Bird, A Fuse 8 Production

A fun exploration of a tiny animal at the base of the ocean food chain

Just 2 inches long full-grown, this little guy is the foundation of the Southern Ocean food chain... “Hi. What are you? You appear to be an egg. You are an egg sinking. For many days, you sink. You sink a mile down, and you keep sinking down… down… until…”

The unidentified narrator follows one krill among billions as it pursues its brief existence, eating and eating while metamorphosing from one thing into another and trying to avoid being eaten. Questions and advice are hurled at the krill on every page, but the krill never responds―because, after all, krill can’t talk, and this is nonfiction.  Krill are the largest animals able to catch and eat phytoplankton, and they in turn are eaten by the largest animals ever to live on earth―blue whales―as well as by seals, penguins, and a host of others. In other words, krill are really good at eating, and they make really good eating. And that makes them the most important animals in the high-latitude oceans.  As in The Whale Fall Café, Dan Tavis’s illustrations combine scientific accuracy with Nemo liveliness and humor. Our star krill is so good at gobbling up phytoplankton that he turns green, so we can pick him out from the crowd racing to escape a penguin’s beak or a blue whale’s gaping maw. The book has been reviewed and endorsed by global krill expert Dr. Stephen Nichol, and the manuscript earned an honorable mention in Minnesota’s McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers. Helpful backmatter is included.

full color

Matt Lilley (Minneapolis, MN) has a master’s degree in scientific and technical communication with a special emphasis on medical writing for kids. A technical writer by day and a children’s nonfiction book author by night, he finds that the night work is harder because it requires making complicated topics interesting as well as easy to understand. He is a Minnesota Master Naturalist and likes writing about science and nature as well as medicine. His previous children’s books include Why We Love and Why We Cry (Capstone) and Canada Geese and Beavers (in ABDO’s “Pond Animals” series).

Dan Tavis has been doodling since his first math class in elementary school and was inspired to paint upon discovering Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Watterson’s work remains a major influence. Dan is the illustrator of Common Critters (2020), The Whale Fall Café(2021), and Fluffy McWhiskers and the Cuteness Explosion (2021) and indulges his passion to illustrate characters that emotionally connect with the viewer and tell stories through visual narrative. Dan creates illustrations with watercolor, ink, and digital media.