The Great Rhino Rescue: Saving the Southern White Rhinos by Sandra Markle - ADVISABLE

The Great Rhino Rescue: Saving the Southern White Rhinos by Sandra Markle. PICTURE BOOK/NON-FICTION. Millbrook Press (Lerner), 2019. 9781512444360

BUYING ADVISORY: EL (K-3), EL - ADVISABLE 

AUDIENCE APPEAL: AVERAGE

The White Rhino lives in southern Africa and has been through waves of dangerous population decline because of the poaching of their horns. After explaining some of the habitats and physical features of the rhino, this book covers the measures people and organizations have gone to to prevent poaching. These include sawing off the horns gently so the rhinos aren’t valuable to poachers, injecting the horns with a dye that ruins them for future sale, persecuting poachers, and passing legislation on the sale of horns.  

I was more engrossed in this book that I expected to be. I was fascinated by the journey to save these animals. The only problem I encountered as I read was that some of the text was interrupted by separate boxes explaining a tangential concept and it was unclear whether to read them immediately when they appear, or only after finishing the previous section. All of the text is in boxes, so this separate information is only identifiable by the color of the box.   

Jen Wecker, HS English Teacher