Tad

What’s it about?

The story.

There are lots of tadpoles in the pond, and Tad is the smallest. While her siblings grow legs and swim confidently, Tad is slower, and the pond has plenty of hungry things that prefer their tadpoles on the small side. Davies uses the frog life cycle as both the literal subject and the emotional structure: the stages of development mirror Tad's growing confidence, and the predators she faces (rendered in Davies' characteristically gorgeous illustration, beautiful and frightening simultaneously) give the story real stakes. The result is genuinely tense in the way that only the best picture books about nature can be, while the transformative ending is earned and emotionally satisfying. The repetitive structure of the text makes it a natural read-aloud, with a call-and-response rhythm that children pick up quickly. Educational in the truest sense, not because it teaches facts, but because it makes the reader care about a tadpole's life cycle enough to want to understand it.