Customer Reviews

Sing, Nightingale, Sing!

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I just got this book out of the library. My daughters liked the illustrations but they were really inspired by the music and the bird songs. The music CD is the soul of this book. The girls just cannot stop listening to it. Now when they listen to bird songs they remember the feeling of relaxation they had listening to this CD and enjoying the pictures. This is a must for any parent who, like me, is trying to teach their kids about the natural world.

"Sing, Nightingale, Sing!" Is a children's non-fiction hardback book and audio CD about birds, their bird calls and music. Originally published in France, this book is a nature guide for children (not a story or a work of fiction), and is being published for distribution in North America by Kane/Miller. The book is divided into these habitats: garden, forest, pond, sea, mountain, and `cages, aviaries and zoos'. Each bird is identified by common name with a linocut illustration of the bird, and each bird is numbered.

The author is Francoise de Guibert. The illustrator is Chiaki Miyamoto and the music is by Daniel Goyone.

This book is accompanied by a CD with 63 tracks. Each track's number correlates to the call of one bird. Fifty of the tracks are high-quality recordings of the bird's call. These can be listened to while reading the data about the bird. Thirteen of the tracks are musical duets; original music composed by Daniel Goyone and played on the piano. These piano and bird song duets are lovely.

The book is indexed to show what page the illustration and information is on and a separate index tells what track the bird call plays on. This is a very nice reference because if you want to hear the call of a specific bird, it can be found easily and played quickly.

On the pro side, this is the least expensive product I have found to hear bird's calls. The audio CD format is very convenient.

One shortcoming is that book does not state where in the world the bird lives. This book was written in France and I discovered that it is Euro-centric in nature. As a reader from North America, right at the beginning of the book I noticed some things that were confusing to me. The birds are named by common name only. Latin names are not given in the book (which some may also feel is a drawback). There are some species which don't live in North America featured in the book. Sometimes a bird is present that we have a similar species here, such as having a Collared Dove in the book while we have the Mourning Dove. The result is that some of our most common backyard birds are missing from the book which seems strange as I feel the first birds my children should know are those that live right in our backyard. However, due to the fact that we do see those birds so frequently, my children already know their names. Also, Americans have plenty of sources for information about those species. I wish the book contained the geographic range of the bird, perhaps with a tiny world map graphic, as children and adults alike may find this interesting.

Something else that was disappointing was that ten of the fifteen bird calls used in the duets are not featured in the book. While the duet track is playing on the CD there is nothing to look at to see the name of the bird or what it looks like, and there are no facts about that bird.

This book fills a void and I am grateful for it. Friends and fellow homeschoolers who have seen my copy of the book are impressed with the product when compared to its low price.

This book would be nice for any family and is especially helpful to homeschoolers and classroom teachers.

Disclosure Statement: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of writing this review. I was not paid to write this review.