Belgian author and illustrator Guido Van Genechten won the Hasselt International Illustrators Award in 1998 with his picture book Ricky. This prize was the beginning of his international career as a children’s book illustrator. In 2007 he was the winner of the Reader’s Digest Award for Best Children’s Book Illustrator, and his book Little Kangaroo was declared Best Picture Book of the Year. Besides Ricky and Little Kangaroo, Guido has created many popular characters, including Little White Fish, Snowy the polar bear, Tito the clown, and Max the badger. Guido studied drawing and painting, graphics, and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mol, Belgium. For many years he worked in the graphic industry. Now he works as a full-time writer and illustrator of children’s books.
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Chickens are descended from dinosaurs, and here’s a chicken with a family photo album to prove it. First the chuffed chicken—or “Gallus gallus domesticus” to a skeptical unseen narrator—opens the album to snapshots of “The Velociraptor Family” to point out similar feet and feathers, then goes on to more distant relatives such as the Iguanodons, the Stegosaurs (“We look a lot alike, don’t you think?”), and the Triceratops clan. Following views of a falling asteroid and other prehistoric catastrophes, the proud pullet struts off to clamber atop a huge egg… only to flee in panic when it hatches out not a “cute little Triceratops chicken” or some other safe playmate but a toothy T. Rex. In his cartoon illustrations Van Genechten doesn’t try for realistic detail but captures “Mommy Loci and Daddy Rapt” rolling past on a stone-wheeled tandem bike, plasters each album leaf with droll captions (“Our first Diplodo-kiss”), and sets up the climactic visual punchline with an earlier portrait of drooling cousin Rex. The egg appears from nowhere in the story, but something very like it is visible in an endpaper gallery of marbled-paper dino eggs. Actual information is included in the form of dates (all B.C.) and (inexplicably) “tickets” scrapbooked into the pages with each dino’s weight in pounds. Young readers who think the dinosaurs are all extinct will appreciate this truthful revelation. Well, truth-y, anyway.
– Kirkus Reviews
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