The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story

Readers will laugh aloud at the silly antics of a pair of opinionated sea mammals in a tale presenting one side of a debate when read front-to-back and the other side when read back-to-front, slyly revealing the way identical facts can be used to support opposite positions.A boastful whale and a showboating otter compete in a battle of words to prove that each is the greatest animal ever to swim the seas.Read one way, the first-person text brags about whales’ superiority; read the other way, it extols how much better otters are.Using true information about the two marine species to make both arguments, Kate Messner’s adroit text and Brian Biggs’s giggle-worthy artwork brilliantly illustrate how the same words can be used to express contradictory opinions when speakers have a one-sided view of the world.Includes factual back matter about language usage and the actual similarities of whales and otters.