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Common Critters

Common Critters celebrates neighborhood wildlife in verse. A familiar cast of characters―worms, slugs, caterpillars, ladybugs, robins, mourning doves, houseflies, spiders, squirrels, skunks, and others―crawls, runs, buzzes, and flits through these lively poems, which show how exotic these seemingly ordinary creatures really are.

Dan Tavis’s humorous illustrations crank up the delight, and a child wanting to learn more will find it in the natural-history backmatter. Pat Brisson employs a variety of verse forms in the book, and she shows how it’s done in a back-of-book feature called “A Peek into the Poet’s Toolkit.”

Common Critters is a three-tool STEAM book with delightful reading, natural history, and language skills rolled into one.
Pat Brisson is the author of 20 books for young readers, including The Summer My Father Was Ten and Sometimes We Were Brave, Tummy Time Friends, and Common Critters. A graduate of Rutgers University, she is a former elementary school teacher, school librarian, and public-library reference librarian. Pat lives in New Jersey with her husband.

Dan Tavis is a 24-year-old illustrator living in New Hampshire. He has been doodling ever since his first math class in elementary school. He has a passion to illustrate characters that emotionally connect with the viewer and tell stories through a visual narrative. Dan created the illustrations for Common Critters with watercolor, ink, and digital media.
“The poems are fun and provide nuggets of scientific information. Delightful cartoons add uncommon whimsy throughout. Further notes in the backmatter about the critters and poetry lend weight to the volume. An uncommon introduction to poetry.” — Kirkus Reviews

“The poems are light and fun, while the entertaining illustrations will draw in readers.” — School Library Journal

“Superlative backmatter.” — Publishers Weekly