Exploring Nature and Learning: A Review of ‘The Den That Octopus Built’

We’ve been working with our 12-year-old on context clues and how to better understand them. Whenever I’m with high school ELA students I work with them on context clues, albeit in a slightly more direct tone. That could fall under the category of “read the room” or being able to infer what happens in a story due to something else occurring. The Den That Octopus Built is a smart illustrated book that tells a grand story with minute details that older readers will get the first time, and younger audiences will latch onto after one reading.

It’s a smart, illustrated book that warms up the audience with gently rhyming stanzas. But, before you can think “baby book”, its illustrations paint a bigger, more complex picture that tells an epic story of nature. As the octopus in the story goes on their journey, the text continues to rhyme and the illustrations fill the pages with their life-and-death adventures. They live with predators around every corner but have an enormous, underwater neighborhood to exist in. Even with the size of the living seas, out of the hundreds of thousands of eggs that a mother giant Pacific Octopus releases, only 1% to 3% of their babies live long enough to make it to adulthood.

That last fact is not one of the ones referenced in the rhyming text. It is alluded to through the illustrations and vaguely hinted at via the text. However, after reading The Den That Octopus Built, I researched to see how the giant Pacific Octopus goes about caring for their masses of octopuses. They blow them out of the octopus den, just like the book says and yes the book clarifies whether it’s octopuses or octopi and we used it correctly the first time.

There’s an almost throw-away line in The Den That Octopus Built that says “This is her last breath setting them free…” and that’s not hyperbole. Shortly after the mother giant Pacific Octopus gives birth she dies, but she still has it better than the males, who die shortly after mating.

It’s easy to enjoy this illustrated book and daydream while you look at the illustrations. You don’t get lost, per se, but the nature-grounded, non-fiction facts are woven in so well with the text that young readers won’t realize that they’re learning something. It’s the life cycle of the giant Pacific Octopus as told through calming text and luxurious illustrations. The final two pages of the book is the payoff for those older readers who can read paragraphs about more details of the animal’s life. Many of the details I mentioned in this post are on those two pages, but I was impatient and looked them up online. There’s also a glossary at the end that defines words that many middle school students won’t know like, shards, sheath, and cephalopod.

This is where facts, education, and entertainment meet each other. A book doesn’t have to be in the first two categories as long as it’s entertaining, and kids want to read it, then the book is a success. The Den That Octopus Built is a fun book that the elementary ages will enjoy. Some readers will just listen to the story, dig into the illustrations and daydream about the sea and its millions of different critters. Other readers will realize that it’s telling a grander story, one that they’ll never see, an eight-legged underwater, tour de force about life, birth and death. They may also see it as a chance to create a fabulous nature story, like the ones that they’re tasked with in fourth or fifth grade. The information in The Den That Octopus Built is there for that level and higher of content, but it’s content to also sit there and be a poetic book about a mother octopus and her thousands of eggs, either way, it’s win/win.

The Den That Octopus Built is by Randi Sonenshine with illustrations by Anne Hunter and is available on Candlewick Press.

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