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    Sad Animal Facts
    Sad Animal Facts
    Sad Animal Facts
    Ebook239 pages59 minutes

    Sad Animal Facts

    By Brooke Barker

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    New York Times Bestseller!

    A delightful and quirky compendium of the Animal Kingdom’s more unfortunate truths, with over 150 hand-drawn illustrations.

    Ever wonder what a mayfly thinks of its one-day lifespan? (They’re curious what a sunset is.) Or how a jellyfish feels about not having a heart? (Sorry, but they’re not sorry.)

    This melancholy menagerie pairs the more unsavory facts of animal life with their hilarious thoughts and reactions. Sneakily informative, and wildly witty, SAD ANIMAL FACTS will have you crying with laughter.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781250095091
    Sad Animal Facts
    Author

    Brooke Barker

    Brooke Barker is a writer and illustrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her successful Instagram account became the basis for her book, Sad Animal Facts. Her favourite animal is the Malayan tapir.

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    Reviews for Sad Animal Facts

    4/5

    52 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Each page has a "sad" animal fact illustrated by a humorous and sometimes pathetic cartoon drawing. Some of the facts will give readers double-takes ("A chipmunk can't recognize its face in a mirror"); fortunately the appendix provides a brief background for each of the facts. (The animals are listed alphabetically in the appendix along with their sad fact but without page references, so readers will have to know how each animal is classified in order to refer back to the cartoon.) The book appears aimed at adults but kids would certainly appreciate "Turtles breathe out their butts." But maybe not so much "If a female ferret goes into heat and doesn't mate she will die."
    • 4/5
      Nature inflicts suffering upon the animal kingdom in weird ways. Such as adult fireflies don't eat and Chipmunks cannot recognize their own reflection. In her book, Sad Animal Facts, Brooke Barker has compiled a collection of unfortunate facts about animals along with hand-drawn illustrations of each. The last few pages are an index which go a little further in depth into each factoid. For instance, while I already knew that butterflies taste with their feet, I didn't realize it was because they are testing for suitable leaves for their caterpillars to eat once hatched. The illustrations are cute, giving us an insight to how these animals might feel about their oddities. The book is a quick read and would make a quirky gift this holiday season, or for any reason.
    • 4/5
      Very funny and informative <3
    • 3/5
      A lot of these facts, if not the majority of them, are actually fascinating and/or relatable, not sad. Oh, pigeons put off doing things they don't want to do? So do I!
    • 4/5
      Fascinating and hilarious. Barker has such an engaging voice, cute art style, and great sense of humor. Four stars, though, due to the typos. I'd give 4.8 if I could.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this book but the book has some spelling mistakes
    • 5/5
      Very cute to read! Great facts and illustrations
    • 4/5
      Sometimes I blurt out random facts to astonished people. (We'll pretend their astonishment is at the sheer amount of bizarre but fascinating knowledge I have rather than at my complete social awkwardness.) I don't know why I retain these random facts but they cheerfully take up something like 90% of my available brain space. I am rather addicted to them and to the books that contain them so when I saw this appealing little book at the cash wrap at the bookstore, it was a foregone conclusion that I'd pick it up and take it home with me.This is very much a gift book. Each page has a brightly colored, basic, hand drawn cartoons of an animal sharing something unknown about its species. Sometimes the fact is sad (if we anthropomorphize) but sometimes its just a fascinating little tidbit about one of the critters with whom we share this planet. Each of the facts is scientifically proven, which will leaving you wondering why science tested certain things in the first place (why did we need to know herrings communicate through farting, that turtles breathe through their butts, that squirrels can't burp, or that dwarf lemurs line their homes with feces?), and the alphabetical index in the back of the book offers more information on each fact. Lest you think there are only gross 12 year old boy type facts in the book (although don't pretend you didn't enjoy reading them just now and aren't going to use them at your next company party because you definitely are), there are also facts about sleeping habits, eating habits, species empathy, and more as well. The illustrations are cute, the facts Barker has chosen to illustrate are interesting (and only a few of them are common knowledge), and the book is a delightful little book to dip in and out of. As a side note, it is also very appealingly constructed, with smooth glossy pages and a heavy feel in your hands. Highly recommended if you too need new gems for your small talk repertoire.
    • 4/5
      A very amusing little book. Bonus: it includes an appendix with more explanations of the facts in each comic - so you have fun and learn something!
    • 5/5
      Too funny. what a fun book!
    • 5/5
      “Turtles breath out their butts.”So, in my opinion of the above, they weren’t all sad facts!The facts are divided into categories - Reptiles and Amphibians, Mammals, Marsupials, Cetaceans and Pinnipeds, Fish, Birds, Insects and Arachnids, Miscellaneous Invertebrates, and an Appendix with little paragraphs about the facts. Each fact has a cute illustration with clever quotes by the animal. It’s super cute, and quite informative! Funny too! As I said, they really aren’t all sad! Like...“Herrings communicate with farts.”and...“Hippos attract mates by peeing.”‘Nuff said!

    Book preview

    Sad Animal Facts - Brooke Barker

    Red Squirrels live alone.

    SAD ANIMAL FACTS

    BROOKE BARKER

    FLATIRON BOOKS

    NEW YORK

    Begin Reading

    Table of Contents

    About the Author

    Copyright Page

    Thank you for buying this

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    For Boaz, if you were a grasshopper

     you could jump over a two-story building.

    INTRODUCTION

    May you be a friend to every creature was my grandmother’s creepy inscription in the Animal Babies book she gave me the day I was born.

    I wanted her words to be prophetic, but my parents wouldn’t let me have any pets and the nearest wilderness was annoyingly far away from our apartment complex in a Toronto suburb. So I settled for a childhood spent reading everything I could about animals.

    What I learned wasn’t always pretty. Just because our four-legged friends are soft and cute and often have amazing abilities doesn’t mean they aren’t also incredibly sad. Everyone knows that pigs are pink and have curly tails, but did you know that they can’t see the sky? Sea turtles are majestic, but did you know that they never meet their parents, or that octopi don’t have friends, jellyfish have no hearts, and zebras can’t fall asleep alone? Animals, it turns out, are just as complicated and conflicted as we are.

    I couldn’t stop reading about those sad little animals. I was obsessed. In third grade I had to leave a birthday party after a horrible run-in with a hive of honeybees. Every one of these stings is a bee that died, I informed my friend’s mom as she drove me home from the last party I got invited to that year.

    A few summers ago, at the end of an uneventful seven-hour whale-watching cruise (we saw zero whales), our captain apologized to us for the hundredth time while we stared at a part of the ocean that looked like all the other parts of the ocean. I thought about how, if a whale sings at the wrong frequency, he can’t find any other whales because they can’t hear his off-key song. His whole life is a failed whale-watching trip.

    The more I learned about animals, the harder it was for me to keep quiet about them. A few years ago I was a reference librarian. It’s not as thrilling as it sounds. It was a pretty slow job in a quiet place, and I passed a lot of the time by drawing animals on the backs of old card catalog slips. Each of my coworkers would suggest an animal at the end of their shift, and I’d draw it on the back of a catalog slip and leave it in the break room at the end of the day. I’d try to go out of my way to add to the drawing some new piece of knowledge about the animal (king cobras can spit venom nine feet), and they’d try to go out of their way to request animals I’d never heard of (monkfish, indri lemurs).

    The more I read, the harder it is not to see these animals talking and complaining about their lives the way we do. The giraffe baby that falls six feet the moment it’s born must think, This is already off to a bad start, and worms with nine hearts must wish they only had someone to love.

    There is a sad fact for every animal on earth, from fish and reptiles to cetaceans (marine mammals) and pinnipeds (a fancy word for seals and their cousins). There are animals that eat their own tails, that can’t recognize their face in a mirror, and that force themselves to cry.

    I hope this book doesn’t force you to cry, and I hope it brings you

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