Charlotte Milner Books

You’ll want to take a while to hang out with this new non-fiction text, especially if you’re batty about facts!

The Bat Book by Charlotte Milner follows in the footsteps of The Bee Book and The Sea Book to highlight to children important ecological issues faced by our planet, this time focusing on the world’s only flying mammals and their importance to our global ecosystem. With the aim of exploring the topsy-turvy world of often unnoticed ‘tiny superheroes’, this book identifies important biological features of bats (such as how similar their wing skeletons are to human hands) and how amazingly well adapted the 1300 different species are to surviving in habitats all over the world. The book then turns its attention to how bats are important to humans, common myths about bats, the challenges that particular species face and actions to help endangered bats.

Bats are often villainised in children’s stories (my four-year-old’s first question when opening this book was ‘do they eat people?’), but this book helps to address misconceptions and emphasises what fascinating, varied and important creatures bats are. Bats assist with pest control, spread seeds through the forests, and help to pollinate hundreds of different species of plants around the world.

The Bat Book is an appealing book for curious readers to pick up and can be enjoyed as a cover-to-cover read or as something to dip in and out of, with a clear contents page, subject headings and an index to aid navigation. The images, diagrams and overall design style make it accessible to younger readers but the facts have enough depth to engage and challenge older readers too, making The Bat Book a worthwhile choice for primary school libraries.