Every so often a book just makes me hoppy. That was the case when I serendipitously passed “Frog day : a story of 24 hours and 24 amphibian lives” by Marty Crump on a book display at the library by my house.
The slightly surprised frog on the cover with the adorably large webbed feet caught my eye immediately. He looked like I caught him doing something harmlessly nefarious. Like swapping his brother’s pond water out for blue jello so he would bounce off when trying to take a swim.
It brought me back to when I was a kid and used to write short stories from the perspective of my pet frog. I would let my frogs hop through my two-story Barbie dream house and imagine what their excavation was like. Then try to imagine the day my brother and I caught him in the park.
In hindsight I imagine it was quite jarring. Being able to hop and swim freely one day, then running into a glass wall the next. I never tried to catch another frog again after I wrote that story. My bad.
Long story short, it was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one anthropomorphizing out amphibian friends all these years. This small volume represents flippers everywhere.
The stories dig into the daily life of our webbed friends and explore the increasingly fragile state of nature and our changing climate. It sucks to be an indicator species, absorbing every toxin through your skin. When a frog is hurting, the world is hurting.
If you have time for a quick read and want to see the world from the ground up, give this little book a gander. I hope it makes you happy too.
