Editorial Review

The City Critters series (6 titles) surveys common urban wildlife, and young readers will easily recognize this volume’s featured animal. Yes, the handsome (or disgusting, depending on where your loyalties lie) rock pigeon struts, snacks, and poops its way through the city in this breezy overview.

The text is tailored to independent readers still developing their literacy skills, with support baked into the large print size, predictable sentence structure, and repetition of vocabulary terms, in both the main text and the labels for the illustrations.

A full-page photo appears on every spread, often with smaller inset pictures reinforcing a fact from the text. Pigeon anatomy, diet, behavior, preferred perches, and reproduction basics get swift coverage. Kids may not learn many new facts, but the familiar subject will make the act of reading nonfiction less daunting.