Children’s Book Review: *Marco Flamingo / Marco Flamenco* by Sheila Jarkins

Back-of-the-book-blurb:  Meet Marco.  He is just regular flamingo with regular flamingo friends.  There is just one problem.  Marco wants to be a winter bird.  Every year he welcomes his geese friends flying south to get out of the cold.  He cannot understand them because the cold is just the thing he ’ craving.  Watch what happens when he travels north for the winter.  Storyline is presented in both English and Spanish.

She is Too Fond of Books’ Review:  Marco Flamingo is a cute picture book about a flamingo who is curious about where his friends Goose and Duck live during the summer months.  They’re reluctant to tell him about the snow and the cold, replying “you don’t want to know!” to his questions.  Marco takes matters into his own hands and dives into books to research “the north,”  then flies to the land of snow, where he has great adventures ice skating, making snow angels, building snowmen, etc.  He sends a postcard to his flamingo friends in the sunny south, who agree that Marco is indeed a “rare bird.”

The storyline is simple, and sends a message encouraging kids to be curious and follow their dreams.  Each page has the complete text in both English (black font) and Spanish (red font); there are a few conversational asides written next to the characters (again, in both languages), and we liked that the postcard showed what Marco wrote to his friends.  The last page has a list of ten vocabulary words in English and Spanish, but no pronunciation guide, which would have been useful.

This is truly a picture book – simple text with a few sentences (at most) on each page, bright acrylic paintings, including a few double-page illustrations with no text at all.  My 4- and 6-year-olds enjoyed the story as a read-aloud, and my 12-year-old like picking out the Spanish vocabulary she knows from studying in school. 

Marco Flamingo / Marco Flamenco is an interesting concept in a line of books from Raven Tree Press; many of their picture books are available in English, Spanish, or bilingual versions.  They list the reading level as 9-12 years, but I don’t know which market they’re catering to in this age range; for an English- or Spanish-speaking audience, the appropriate target would be 3-7 years, based on the simplicity of the text and the amount of illustration.