Book Description
for The Dream of the Thylacine by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
"Trapped am I, in cage of twisty wire, cold concrete. Prowl Rage Howl. Know you not that I am tooth and claw-see me hunt through bracken and bush, see me swagger across wild lands, see me glory at the edge of a cliff." A powerful book about captivity and extinction blends a spare, stream-of-conscious-like narrative imagining the voice of the last known thylacine, which died in captivity in the late 1930s, with two visual narratives. One is lush, full-page spreads of the thylacine in the wild as it dreams of its former life as part of the natural world. The other is an unsettling series of black-and-white photographic images blending blurred stills of the animal in captivity taken from a BBC documentary in 1937 with wood walls and wire fencing. A brief note provides more information on this carnivorous marsupial, also known as the Tasmanian Tiger, that is now believed to be extinct. (Age 9 and older)
CCBC Choices 2014. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2014. Used with permission.