Book Review: Crabs

Book Review: Crabs

Author: Herbert S. Zim

Date: 1974

Publisher: William Morrow & Company

ISBN: 0-688-30114-2

Length: 64 pages including index

Illustrations: drawings by René Martin

 

Quote: “Crabs show another interesting kind of growth that is called regeneration.”

This is an informative little picture book, meant to be a challenging read in grades three and four, informative enough to interest adults.

Reviewing Crabs, about which there’s little for an amateur to say, provides me with as good an opportunity as any to share what I know about books for children and the notion of “reading levels.”

I learned to read before my fourth birthday. Being a child prodigy was good for lots of adult attention and resulting envy and hostility from other children. People handed me all sorts of grown-up things to read; I remember entertaining our pediatrician by reading aloud from his medical journals. Like most children who figure out phonics and seem to be “reading” material beyond their age level, I didn’t understand or remember most of the grown-up stuff I “read”. I remember keeping myself awake, reading the medical journal, by imagining “Hemoglobin” as a little cartoon goblin; I remember that even Charlotte’s Web was far enough over my head, at four, that I rediscovered it as a completely new book at eight.

In most ways my brother was more precocious than I was. Let’s just say that while I was being the child prodigy and waiting for kids my age to catch up with me, my brother, three years younger, was never far behind me in anything. So naturally people expected him to start reading at three, after playing with alphabet blocks and magnets, as I had. But he didn’t. He could spell out short messages (“I LOVE YOU MOM”) with magnetic letters, and he liked to have grown-up books read to him, but he didn’t seem to read even picture books by himself until age six. As a result, in primary school his I.Q. was drastically underestimated. At home, while he was in grades one through three, he’d find me reading something age-appropriate like Tom Sawyer or Heidi and want to read it too. He’d read a few pages and then bring the book back to me: “Would you read the rest of it? I’m tired.”

Toward the end of grade three he spent a rainy morning curled up with one of those Zane Grey books I scorned, and then my brother became a reader. He liked all stories with dogs and horses in them, but his preference was for grown-up nonfiction; there was no in-between stage. He’d liked to have history, biography, and simple science read aloud even at six. We had to imagine that my brother had had the mental ability to read even at three, but had had to wait for his eyes to mature before he could enjoy reading ordinary-size print.

Later we learned that this is quite a common way children, especially boys, learn to read. They may be intelligent enough to learn the letters before age six, but they are slightly farsighted up to six, eight, even ten, and won’t start reading ordinary books for pleasure until their eyes are ready for that job. If they are not given an emotional complex about it, or forced to wear glasses that may interfere with the development of normal vision, they usually outgrow this farsightedness in time to catch up with their age group at school--or pass it. (How computers affect the development of children’s eyes remains to be learned.) That’s why books that work for most primary school students will have large clear print.

Crabs has large clear print, and although my brother was not particularly interested in crabs, this is the kind of book that primary school students like him need. A slow-reading first-grader who lived near the beach and was interested in crabs might enjoy reading this book, a page or two at a time, as his eyes would allow, in time to relieve the anxiety of adults who underestimate his intelligence because he’s not reading novels.