As the Crow Flies (review)

Crows don't get a lot of love in picture books, so it's nice to see some attention paid here to these clever and familiar birds. In rhyming text, Keenan describes the daily activities—mostly scavenging, stealing, and gathering together in a group roost—of crows from the birds' point of view. The verse is unfortunately uneven; while some turns of phrase are clever ("Watch the sly way we finagle/ a big piece of the pigeon's bagel"), too often the rhythms chop and change, impeding the scansion and making reading aloud smoothly a challenge. The text is sometimes evocative, though, and it contains some handy opportunities for teaching vocabulary ("corvid," "cache," etc.). An author and illustrator's note at the end briefly touches upon why crows are worthy of more attention than they receive, but kids may find themselves wanting even more information as some things, like the huge gathering of crows in the book's end, are described in the text but not really explained. Duggan's illustrations employ subtle watercolor-style tints textured with pastel-like graininess, and the slightly smudgy edges and adroit use of light and shadow as the day turns into night give the crows a pleasant hint of mystery. Adults who have seen Hitchcock's The Birds may twitch a bit at the spread in which numerous crows ominously perch in a cemetery, but kids will likely be unfazed by such a corvid cluster. Despite its shortcomings, this could be useful as an introduction to a nature study lesson or as a poetic part of a bird-themed story session.