The text reads as well but a lighter font does not go so well with the linocuts. Endnotes provide information without disrupting the story. Each snake featured in this book has been placed in a photographer's white box to be photographed. The effect given when the book is opened is to see a very realistic vivid image of a snake across a white double-page spread. Snakes chosen are both venomous and non-venomous but do not include any Australian examples despite some of the most poisonous snakes in the world originating here.
Text is very simple with a few more facts about each species given on the last page.
Photography by Frank Greenaway and Dave King. With two such highly regarded creators of children's books as Roger McGough and illustrator Chris Riddell, this book could hardly lose. Narrated in the first person, the small girl telling the story explains how she used to think various gadgets worked pre-Dudley. Dragons toasting bread and snakes as vacuum cleaners are just two illustrated in glorious nonsensical detail. After meeting Dudley the learned bespectacled dog, the real mechanism behind these and other inventions is explained to her.