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  • Best Foot Forward: Exploring Feet, Flippers, and Claws by Ingo Arndt
  • Deborah Stevenson
Arndt, Ingo . Best Foot Forward: Exploring Feet, Flippers, and Claws; tr. from the German by J. Alison James; written and illus. with photographs by Ingo Arndt. Holiday House, 2013. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-8234-2857-1 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2-4.

This introductory nature-study photoessay takes a look at feet from a literally different perspective—most of the feet are photographed from the underside, showing the characteristics of the foot that really make it valuable to its owner. The format is the classic tease and reveal, with a spread asking "Whose foot is this?" followed by a spread with the answer and some images of a few other feet in the relevant category ("feet that walk," "feet that climb," "feet that swim," etc.). The text in this German import is streamlined and focused, acting mainly as captions for the photographs, which are the real stars of the show. The photos typically feature the limb in question isolated against an inky black background for maximum focus, and the details—the prickly spininess of a lobster's foot, the almost botanical purity of the gecko's foot, the leathery delicacy of the pink pads of the tiger—are visually arresting. The few photographs that deviate from the underside approach fail to identify the alternative perspective, but the underlying—heh—interest still carries the day. This is easily browsable even for kids not up to the reading level, who will enjoy the visual guessing game, and it's a logical partner for Steve Jenkins titles such as What Do You Do with a Tail Like This? (BCCB 3/03) or step-up to Nic Bishop. A brief index allows readers to hunt by animal.

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