Slothlove will give you warm feelings about slow creatures

I don’t know much about sloths. I know that they’re the embodiment of slow things, have a couple of pointy fingers and look like Samara from The Ring when she’s crawling on the floor. They also seem to smile a lot; I’m not sure if they’re actually happy or if most of them simply have a fur pattern that humans identify with as a smile. You may have guessed that Slothlove is the most unlikely book that you’ll love about lazy(?) creatures that are probably happy all of the time who you’re most likely never likely to see in the wild.

Slothlove by Sam Trull is not just a picture book on sloths. Granted the book mainly has photos of sloths, baby sloths, big sloth, swimming, sleeping and more sloths. The book starts out with Trull telling readers that sloths saved her life, which is true. She experienced a couple life shocks that changed what she thought her future would look like. After travelling for a bit she ended up in Costa Rica where she started working for KSTR, Kids Saving the Rainforest; a group that assists abandoned and orphaned animals in the hopes of releasing them back into the wild.

Readers will come for the sloth pictures but be invested in them by Trull’s true life tale of how she started to know them. There is Elvis, the Newbie, Kermie and others that you’ll meet. She details how each of the sloths came to be in their care, in addition to lots of photos during their stay at KSTR. For example Kermie had a tracker put on him so that the staff can monitor him 24/7 when he was released into the jungle.

The book also has tons of sloth facts. Not that you’d ever want to know about a sloth, but the photos are so darn cute that you find yourself learning without realizing it. That ‘smile’ they do is actually due to their lack of facial muscles. Sloths aren’t lazy per se, that just can’t store many calories, and therefore they can’t be too active.  Some are two-toed while others are three-toed and they’re all great swimmers. After reading the book once I realized that if my textbooks in college had photos of cute animals above the text then my grades would’ve been exponentially higher.

The content in Slothlove is OK for all ages. The vocabulary is such that an upper middle-school student can read the information without any assistance. Our 6 year old loves looking at the happy photos and is secretly wishing that we could adopt one.