Are you hungry? There’s a ton of good eating if you know where to look. My friend, Matt Lilley has a yummy, new book coming out from Tilbury House in January 2022, Good Eating: The Short Life of Krill and is illustrated by Dan Tavis. Perhaps krill are not the kind of food you and I eat but they are on the menu for many ocean creatures from humongous blue whales to not-so-big penguins. I recently received the ARC and the Reader Guide (link below) for this thought-provoking book. It is a belly-full of animal facts about their eventful lives and has been nominated as a “Junior Library Guild Selection”.

“Good Eating: The Short Life of Krill follows the life of an Antarctic krill, starting with an egg sinking in the deep sea. The 2nd-person narrative follows the krill as it metamorphoses from a “six-armed oval” into a 26-legged glutton, and as it rises from the ocean’s deep midnight zone to the surface, encountering all sorts of hungry sea creatures as it grows.

Antarctic krill can catch and eat one-celled phytoplankton, and krill 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. Antarctic krill are the keystone species of the Southern Ocean.

This book will lead to discussions about

·      The ocean food web
·      Life stages and metamorphosis
·      Narrative point of view”