Queens of the Jungle: Meet the Female Animals Who Rule the Animal Kingdom!

Gr 2-5–A fun, colorful, nonfiction book about female members of the animal kingdom. In the introduction, York shares her reasons for creating the book: “male animals have historically received more attention than females. One major reason for this was that until relatively recently, the male scientists of our species were the ones getting the most attention. Now that women scientists are starting to get the recognition they deserve, we are finding out more about female animals than ever before.” Each spread features either an animal or a general topic as it relates to the females of various species (e.g., live birth, parthenogenesis, and migration). The text is stimulating and written at a developmentally appropriate level for elementary grades. The book is vibrantly and effectively illustrated in full color, and bookended by a table of contents, glossary, and index (unfortunately, no bibliography). The book’s theme begs the question of whether it is further reifying human binary gender norms by applying them to animal species, but simply with a different lens than the male-dominated scientific paradigm of the past. This conceptual tension is somewhat evident for example on page 71 about clownfish, when the author writes, “whether an animal is male or female is not always a simple question.” However, an accessible and interesting text about overlooked female animals is certainly still a welcome intervention to the nonfiction catalogue.