Review & Giveaway: A Place for Fish by Melissa Stewart

Fish make our world a better place.

But sometimes people do things that make it hard for them to live and grow.

In A Place for Fish, Melissa Stewart explains to young children how certain acts of humans can affect the fish population.  For example, scientists discovered the migrating paths of hammerhead sharks.  They notified fishing crews to avoid this paths during the sharks’ migration time and now the sharks have a better chance of surviving.

If farmers find new ways, other than dangerous chemicals, to improve crops, fish can thrive.  In the Chesapeake Bay,  chemicals the farmers used to increase their crops seeped into the bay, causing algae growth to increase, taking away valuable oxygen from the seahorses & fish that lived there.   In 2003, the farmers started reducing the amounts of fertilizer used.  It’s still too early to see how this has affected the creatures living in the bay, but scientists are hopeful.

 A Place for Fish is the perfect book to read during Earth Day celebrations. Not only does it introduce children to fish life around the country, it shows the impact that humans have on their survival. As with her Stewart’s previous books, the colorful & detailed illustrations (by Higgins Bond) really add to the book.

The book concludes with some fascinating fish facts, a few of which my eleven-year-old science genius was unaware of.  Here are a few:

• Most brands of lipstick contain ground-up fish scales (ew!)
• Most young fish are caled fingerlings, but young shark and sawfish are called pups.
• The smallest fish on Earth is the stout infantfish.  It is so small it could sit on top of a pencil eraser.  The largest fish is the great whale shark, larger than a school bus.

A Place for Fish is the perfect addition to your home, school & public library!  My boys & I enjoyed this book so much we plan on donating a copy to their school library.

Thank you to Peachtree Publishers for providing me a copy of this book.  To celebrate Earth Day, Peachtree has organized a two week tour entitled “Fins, Wings and Other Things!”  Following are the stops on this week’s portion of the tour:

Thanks to the publisher, I have one copy of the book to give away! To enter, please fill out the form below.  As this is a publisher-sponsored giveaway, entries are only open to US residents.  The winner will be announced on Earth Day, Friday, April 22nd.  Good luck to all who enter!