Please Don’t Bite Me!, smart text and timeless art serves up insects right

There are some books and some publishers that are impossible to resist for elementary school readers. These are the types of books that operate like a friendly, education-based Venus Flytrap. Kids will open the book to any page, be curious or entertained about what they see, and then thumb forward or backward to dig into more of the book. The book’s title, Please Don’t Bite Me! also entices kids to open it up. Instead of asking a question, it posits something in the form of a statement. What could be biting me? It’ll probably hurt, I sure hope this thing doesn’t bite me. Is this biting thing something that’s poisonous?

Please Don’t Bite Me! offers up all manner of questions and mental images just by its title alone. As elementary through lower-middle school students open the book they’ll see the myriad of small insects that this book says could bite you. It’s presented in an art deco style of illustration that makes the image of a wasp look as timeless today as if you showed this book to someone thirty years on either side of today’s timeline.

The pages are corner-to-corner in full color, and offer up young readers ample chances to engage their senses solely by the subtle shifts in hues. They are accentuated due to the short content paragraphs that Please Don’t Follow Me has on every page. The chapters are introduced via slightly longer text that fourth-graders will be able to read, except for those bigger scientific words like metamorphosis. As each new thing that can bite is introduced we’re provided with its main characteristics, disgusting facts, their relationship with humans or other creepy things that kids will find interesting.  

Some of the facts are icky and disgusting, but they aren’t presented in a glossy or gross-out manner. Again, let’s compare other non-fiction reference books to Nat Geo Kids, which many elementary kids associate with science text. The text in Please Don’t Bite Me! is nature-STEM that kids will be attracted to, and is done is a smarter presentation. The books as mentioned earlier would have some jackwagon Youtuber, annoying stating “isn’t that gross?”, while the camera zooms in and out fast enough to cause seizures, whereas Please Don’t Bite Me is more fascinated by it and realizes that kids will be too.

The result is an effortless, longer, deeper dive into the book. This is a book that will yield more scientific information to non-fiction, elementary school papers that they have to do. In fifth grade, students will start to learn about sourcing information and the importance of establishing multiple sources of facts for those papers. In other news: Google is not a source. Please Don’t Bite Me provides the intelligence that upper-elementary kids want, even though they say that they don’t. It’s also from a different perspective to a subject they aren’t familiar with.  They’ve certainly seen or heard about mosquitoes, wasps, cockroaches, fleas, bedbugs or lice, but they probably haven’t read about them, much less wanted to read about them.

The soft, trippy segue between the illustrations are a multi-colored Rorschach Test that look at home with David Cassidy when he was in his really cool phase. Please Don’t Bite Me also has that elusive factor of wanting kids to repeat various facts. A flea can jump up to eight inches, which is the same as a human jumping over the Eiffel Tower. A cockroach was intentionally sent to space and spent 12 days going around the planet before returning to Earth. When lice are inside of their eggs (that are glued onto one strand of your hair) they are impossible to kill. In other news: having lice doesn’t mean that you’re dirty, smelly or used the wrong pronoun, it’s just a case of bad luck. There are more than 300 varieties of mosquitoes and they live everywhere except Antarctica and Iceland because it’s too extreme. See? Please Don’t Bite Me is impossible to resist, sucking you in with as much temptation as the underside of your forearm on a warm, summer night to any of the creepy crawlies listed in the book. Factor in the old-school charm of the cardboard, embossed cover that has raised letters, sunken circular holes that echo a body of water and you have non-fiction, illustrated book leisure reading, with just enough ick to bring in kids who otherwise wouldn’t be there.

Please Don’t Bike Me: Insects That Buzz, Bite, and Sting is by Nazzy Pakpour with illustrations by Owen Davey and is available on Flying Eye Books.

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