We Travel So Far: exploring the wonders of our wandering wildlife.

This beautiful, hardback book (Laura Knowles & Chris Madden) takes readers on a journey around our Earth as companions of some of the creatures that spend their lives migrating.

We travel first through water – crisscrossing the oceans with whales and lobsters and swimming up and down rivers with salmon and eels. Then we take flight with hummingbirds, bats and locusts before landing on the ground to walk with elephants, crabs and penguins. The range of subjects is wide, as are the landscapes through which the creatures must venture.

Each ‘story’, written by Laura Knowles, is a poem to that creature’s amazing abilities and innate need to move. Onomatopoeia allows the reader to hear the different animals tramping, clacking, beating and darting to find food or shelter. The start and end points of each journey are made clear, as are the dangers along the way.

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Chris Madden’s gorgeous illustrations of the animals capture the grace, determination and (in many cases) hardships that they face. The rich tones and sharp outlines draw you in; the reader is invited to focus on one or two animals in detail, while the animals in the background allow the reader to see the massive scale of some of these migratory groups.

The last story looks at humans as travellers and leaves the reader thinking about why humans travel. The final pages include a map of the world and migration data for each animal, making this book useful and interesting to older readers too.

I can imagine this book being put to good use in a classroom looking at animals and habitats, but it is so beautiful and interesting that it would be lovely to sit down and pore over at bedtime to discover some of the wonders of our wandering wildlife.

We Travel So Far by Laura Knowles and Illustrated by Chris Madden is published by words&pictures (Quarto Group).

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