This Is How To Spot Animals – written and illustrated by Aline Portman, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2026
This wonderful picture book is an inventive twist on the look-and-find genre, but also a gentle and sincere reminder to keep your eyes open. You never can tell what you will find all around you. The narrator is a bear, personified to the extent that he is wearing red pants and has a pair of binoculars. (His half an outfit is the reverse of Winnie the Pooh’s.)
Even with his enhanced vision and alert attitude, he misses so much. His awareness that a rare and beautiful bird is a sight not to be missed leads him nowhere. He acknowledges that “spotting animals isn’t easy,” although his exceptional skills are obvious, at least to him. Aline Portman takes her character at his word, as he is honestly enthusiastic, if misguided. The fact that he instructs to reader to follow guidelines is funny, without a hint of mockery.
The degree of disparity between what people, and bears, say and do will not be lost on children, who have no doubt noticed that adults are prone to this flaw. Portman’s pictures, rendered in pencil, soft pastel, and markers, bring out the bear’s character. “Never lose focus!” he warns, in bright enlarged font, while bent in luxurious rest over a dome-shaped rock. Meanwhile, a boar, fox, and squirrel are dancing away from him. In a reverse of the busy pages filled with relentless activities and objects typical of look-and-find books, This Is How to Spot Animals features selected figures set against white space.
In one scene, the bear reminds readers to look inside a hollow tree trunk; they might be rewarded with the sight of a stag beetle. In fact, there while there is no stag beetle, there is an actual stag, a majestic animal leaping proudly as if in flight. His antlers seem like wings. The stag-to-stag beetle ratio make the bear’s disappointment even funnier: “But today we’re out of luck. There’s nothing to see here.” Luck is not the problem for this bear.
Does he have a problem? His disappointment at missing the bear and the bird, let alone the gaggle of geese don’t seem significant. He’s enjoying himself, stretched into a yoga-position bridge between two rocks as the geese walk across him. This is not a didactic story. The bear is not asking to be reprimanded for his inattentiveness. His focus is not limited to binocular lenses. Perhaps he’s having some fun with his young readers, who are no doubt accustomed to attention-shifting requirements. The “very rare animal” who is the object of his search may be in the eye of the beholder.
