Eight Dolphins of Katrina: A True Tale of Survival by Janet Wyman Coleman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The cover led me to believe this would be a photo-illustrated book. But Yan Nascimbene is such a well-known name that I was surprised to see the incongruous cover photograph and insides illustrated.
I was disappointed by the storyboard. There's not much plot to tell in this story, which is fine. But there was a lot of science and psychology to explore, and Coleman only hinted at this. So the pacing of the story could have been drawn out to help me learn more about these specific dolphins and trainers. Instead the last several pages were given to stand-alone examples of dolphins being clever and helpful--each one on its own page with a full illustration on the facing page. I thought these should have been text-only features all on one page in the back matter, or scattered as vignettes throughout the book.
Nascimbene's illustrations for the 8 Dolphins story did something unique on their own, providing a complementary narrative. They could stand as their own storyboard. But because of the abrupt shift to the examples at the end of the book, he reverted to corresponding illustrations that didn't do much beyond mirroring what was told in the text.
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