Have You Seen an Elephant? (Alex's Field Guides, 1) by Elina Ellis
Published by Kids Can Press ISBN: 152530674X
Genres: Adventure, Animals, Non-Fiction
Format: Picture Book Nonfiction
Source: MSL Book Review
Goodreads

Have You Seen an Elephant? is the first in a series of humorous non-fiction picture books of “Alex’s Field Guides,” by Elina Ellis.

We open the book to find that our fictional explorer guide named Alex has a whole journal dedicated to Elephants. She takes us on an expedition in the book to find a real elephant. What follows is a series of pages where Alex is searching for elephants in the wild, asking many animals in the elephant’s habitat, “Have you seen an elephant?” In many of the illustrations, we can see parts of an elephant or elephants right out of Alex’s vision, which gives readers that amusing feeling of being able to spot something that the character can’t find. Within this type of dialogue, Alex will open her “journal” of elephant information that gives the reader the non-fiction facts.

The format of this book is highly entertaining for kids who may have trouble engaging with non-fiction texts. The Chickadee Nominee, Chickadee: Criminal Mastermind was illustrated by Ellis; for fans of that book, I would highly recommend this as well since it has a very similar style.

Reviewed by Gia Pilgrim Charles, Patten Free Library, Bath