Coral
Coral
Coral

Coral

Amy Sky Koster (Author)

Lisel Jane Ashlock (Illustrator)

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Endlessly varied, coral species are evocative of fire, fans, feathers, and so much more, but they all share a common home.

Reviews

"This stunning board book by Amy Sky Koster with illustrations by Lisel Jane Ashlock is both informative and quite amusing as readers see coral that looks like a sea pen, a red fan, fire, and spaghetti! With twelves types of coral shown throughout the book, Coral is an amazing resource for families and schools to observe these intricate structures of nature in illustrated form. Coral would also be an excellent companion on your next trip to a local aquarium." –Where the Board Books Are, February 2022

Reviews

This stunning board book by Amy Sky Koster with illustrations by Lisel Jane Ashlock is both informative and quite amusing as readers see coral that looks like a sea pen, a red fan, fire, and spaghetti! With twelves types of coral shown throughout the book, Coral is an amazing resource for families and schools to observe these intricate structures of nature in illustrated form. Coral would also be an excellent companion on your next trip to a local aquarium.

–Kelsie Marie Paff, Where the Board Books Are, 02/05/2022

This unassuming read is implemented phenomenally. The author takes twelve natural corals and pairs them with rhymes shown on opposite pages. While a few of the coral names might be unusual, they are generally common words that even a young child will know and recognize. Readers’ creativity is triggered by metaphor, such as sea pen and red fan or fire and wire. Moreover, the illustrations elegantly reflect and depict these names. With such relatable text playing keenly on an important literary device, the corals offer to bring the natural world into a new light. While differences between corals are revealed throughout; at the very end, we learn that all of these corals share one very important thing: they provide a home for fish. Finally, the last page serves as a quick reference, summarizing the different corals shown throughout. There is a real elegance to the way this book captures and highlights the art and imagination inspired by the natural world, enhanced by soft, calming, and soothing colors. For young pre-readers still learning the concept of print, the sparse words and thickly constructed pages add to the pleasing simplicity. Conversely, the well-curated content makes this selection suitable for older children with a curiosity for the sea and a learning tool for comparative thinking.

–Kate Kupiec, Children's Literature, 01/01/2022

The beautiful marine invertebrates featured in “Coral”are laid out singly on thick paper in the board-book style that is customarily intended for very small children, but the relative complexity of the idea of corals, and the graceful strangeness of their shapes, will make this volume more interesting for children ages 4-7. “Fire. / Wire. / Feather. / Spaghetti leather,” go the economical captions by Amy Sky Koster for Lisel Jane Ashlock’s observant portraits of these sea creatures. A single-page glossary gives the English name for each species of coral. (The four I’ve alluded to are: Fire coral, Wire coral, Feather black coral and Spaghetti finger leather coral.) Apart from a single concluding picture that shows the corals in a submarine idyll, there’s no further information about their ways or means, making “Coral” more an elegant book of shapes than any kind of introduction to the multiplicity of undersea life. 

–Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal, 06/27/2022

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