Reach behind you and press at the very bottom of your spine. The hard knot under your thumb is a tail.
That is the last page of this book, and it is the best one. Everything before it runs the house format without variation: one animal to a spread, one tail, one true fact, a Howard McWilliam cartoon of a child wearing it. $4.99, K to 3, one sitting and not a long one.
The science it actually teaches
Four things. Four is all of it, and I would rather say so than pad the list out to six.
The first is the frame the whole book runs on. A tail is a tool, and every spread is answering the same question: what is this particular one for? That question is worth more than any single animal in the book.
Then two answers that sit at opposite ends. A peacock's tail is for being looked at, which is a genuinely odd category to a child who assumes every body part does work. A scorpion's is a weapon with the stinger at the tip, doing the reverse job: nobody is meant to admire it, they are meant to leave.
The fourth is the tailbone. Small bones, fused, sitting at the base of your child's spine where a tail would attach. They have been carrying it their whole life and have never once thought about it. That last page is why the book earns a spot on our Stealth Science shelf.
The book has more spreads than the two animals I have named. Those two are the ones I can stand behind from the product page, and pointing at what I know beats listing animals from memory.
The child it lands with
The five year old who is not reading yet and will sit for one more book as long as it is short and has a joke in it. That is the audience, and it is a real one.
There is a second reader here too: the older one who has stalled. High interest, few words to a page, no chapter to finish. A seven year old who has decided they are bad at reading can finish this in a sitting and be entirely right to feel good about it.
One place to stop and talk
Do not read the last page. Close the book one spread early and tell your child there is one more animal in it, and it is them.
Then go and find it. Have them reach behind and press up the base of the spine until they hit the hard part. Ask what that is. They will say bone, and they will be right, and then you say: that is where a tail attaches.
The reason to do it in that order is that the book will simply tell them, and being told is worth less than finding. It costs you ninety seconds. It is the one page in here about their own body, and it is the only one they can check with their hands.
What to know going in
This is a browsing book and it teaches less than it looks like it does. Four ideas across a lot of pages, at a price that is fair for exactly that and no more. If you are buying it as a science lesson you will be finished by Tuesday and slightly annoyed.
The scorpion spread is a weapon, and a small number of young children then think about stingers for a week. Not a reason to skip it, just a reason not to be caught out.
Nothing else in it needs a warning. It is cheap, kind and silly, and it is not pretending otherwise.
Where to get it
It is $4.99 at What If You Had an Animal Tail?, the cheapest door onto this shelf, which is why a lot of families start here.
I would not start here. Not because it is bad, but because it is the purest version of the format, and the purest version is the one that teaches least. If you own none of them, get What If You Had an Animal Home instead, which is about what animals build rather than what they grew. Buy this one second, once your child has already asked for another, and buy it precisely because it is five dollars and will be read forty times. They all sit together on the Stealth Science shelf if you want to look at them side by side first.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Animal Scales: Fur, Feathers and the Same Five Jobs
What If You Had Animal Scales!? or Other Animal Coats? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Animal Teeth: Which What If You Had Book to Buy First
What If You Had Animal Teeth? by Sandra Markle
Grade K to 3
Over and Under the Pond: Why You Cannot See In
Over and Under the Pond: (Environment and Ecology Books for Kids, Nature Books, Children's Oceanography Books, by Kate Messner
Grade K to 3
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
