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Batty
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About the Author

Sarah Dyer was born in Brighton in 1978. She moved to London to study a BA in Illustration at Kingston University. Her first book Five Little Fiends , which won the 2001 Smarties Bronze Award, started as a project in the second year of University. Her favourite medium to work in is oil pastels, ink, pencils and collage. She lectures in Illustration at Kingston and Middlesex universities and has recently completed an MA in Illustration/Sequential Design at Brighton University.Sarah lives in Hove.

Reviews

Suffused with humour... A warm-hearted, humorous exploration of acceptance that used the form of the picture book to full effect and shows different ways of looking at the world. Bookseller A touching story about what it feels like to be an outsider and how you can make friends...An entertaining look about fitting in. Lovereading Sarah Dyer's sweet tale shakes off the spooky associations, portraying an adorable and endearingly insecure fella who's desperate for a little attention. In the zoo where he lives, it's always the 'wow' attractions like the lions and the penguins who pull the crowds. All Batty can do is hang upside down... In a novel twist, the illustrations alternate between being topsy-turvy abd the right way up. All those changing perspectives make for some dizzying, page-flipping fun. And savvy, eagle-eyed readers will soon pick up another narrative unfolding in the background... Junior Sarah Dyer's humorously distinctive pencil and pastel illustrations show much of the action from Batty's upside down perspective so birds appear to perch on the underside of branches, lions to snooze on the underside of ceilings and penguins to plunge upwards into their pool. Signs notices and bird calls provide added wit and interest to the quirky pictures which themselves require a degree of sophistication to interpretation. Books for Keeps The charm of this picture book lies in the lively and detailed illustrations, some of them printed upside down to show Batty's view of the world. It is a book to be looked at together as children will enjoy turning it around to study the pictures the other way up. School Librarian All great fun. Carousel This brilliant book teaches you how to look at the world from a bat's point of view. Don't waste time hanging around - go out and read this book! Gabrielle Carey (aged 10) Ibby Link

Dyer's story has a clever visual gimmick, but offers many other charms, as well. Batty is a zoo-dwelling, long-eared bat; Dyer (Monster Day at Work) draws Batty's flowery pink snout and crenellated ears with a folk-naive earnestness that extends to her bundled-up zoogoers and loosely developed backgrounds. Zoo visitors tend to drift past Batty toward the more popular, talented animals; he tries hanging out with the eager-to-groom gorillas and the raucous birds in the aviary ("it is far too noisy for his sensitive ears"), but he doesn't fit in. The gimmick? The spreads in which Batty watches the other animals are upside-down, as a hanging bat would see them, with intervening spreads right-side-up-an entertaining way of representing Batty's point of view. Batty's talent, it turns out, is for making friends; the animals he's visited (and a new human friend, too) are all hanging upside-down in his enclosure when he gets back. Dyer's understated humor, both in her text and artwork, makes for a winning take on the be-true-to-yourself theme. Ages 3-6. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

K-Gr 2-Batty is not the most popular animal in the zoo because all he is able to do is hang upside down. He tries to be like the other creatures, swimming and eating fish like the penguins, befriending the gorillas (who might have fleas), relaxing in the sun with the lions, and listening to the birds chatter in the tropical aviary. But the bat is just not cut out for any of these lifestyles and dejectedly flies home, where he is greeted by all those animals, hanging upside down on his trees. The underlying message is nothing new, but Dyer uses pencil and pastel illustrations to show the different parts of the zoo from Batty's upside-down perspective. Readers are invited to turn the book over to see the world through his eyes, making the story fun and interactive. Pair this title with Kathi Appelt's Bat Jamboree (Morrow, 1996) for bat-themed storytimes or Eric Carle's The Mixed-Up Chameleon (Crowell, 1975) for a lesson in being comfortable in one's skin.-Amy Commers, South St. Paul Public Library, MN (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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