The Bumpy, Lumpy Horseshoe Crab is a horseshoe crab adventure with a happy ending. This picture book has a whimsical, rhyming style, and portrays horseshoe crabs exhibiting behaviors that they commonly use in real life. It's the perfect choice for a family read-aloud for children 4-10 years old. It also is a great tool for teachers who are studying marine life, tidepools, or coastal sea animals. The fun, colorful, simply drawn illustrations are expressive, and bring each sea creature to life. Although two horseshoe crabs are the central characters, periwinkles, limpets, barnacles, and green and jonah crabs are also portrayed in the story. At the end of the story, there are pages containing information about horseshoe crabs and other sea animals that appear in the story.
I received this wonderful children’s book on Wednesday and couldn’t wait to read it to my first graders at Brophy Elementary School. The students extremely enjoyed this story as a read aloud as they had touched and felt a horseshoe crab when we went to the Aquarium. The rich vocabulary and rhymes kept students highly engaged. Although my students knew it was a fiction story, they appreciated the non-fiction elements including the glossary, diagrams, and facts throughout the book. They wondered whether the author was an expert on horseshoe crabs. Some direct quotes from my students include: “I like this book because it tells us about real life in the ocean,” “I think it is a good book and I hope the author writes another book about a seahorse,” “The pictures are cool! How did she make them? Maybe with markers.”
