Imagine you're an African penguin living in South Africa, ready for an adventure. Not in a cage. In your own busy colony in Simon's Town, near Cape Point. The beach is rocky and sandy. The water, cold and clear. Your neighbors are your fellow penguins, friends and family and hundreds of other members that keep returning to the same beach year after year.
From the first blush of sunrise to the warm, amber glow of sunset, Busy Penguins spends an entire day with these animals. The book moves in a slow and natural meter of rhyme that matches the natural rhythm of the natural world. Along the way, readers will encounter Africa's most iconic penguins in their natural environment. Wading. Walking. Swimming. Climbing. Nesting
Each photograph has been chosen not simply because it is beautiful - though beautiful they are, every one - but because it puts the reader inside the world of these charming, busy penguins. You are not observing from behind a fence. You are there with them at the water's edge. The photography is immersive, intimate, and alive. You can almost feel the feeling of community rising from each encounter. You can almost hear their calls and hoots.
The questions the book invites are not answered with text. They are answered with curiosity - the kind that lingers long after the last page is turned, the kind that sends a child to ask a parent, a teacher, a librarian: Tell me more.
Because that is the magic of this book. It does not simply show penguins or their habitat. It makes a reader want to be there - want to know it, understand it, protect it. In an age when children are increasingly disconnected from the natural world, Busy Penguins with its easy rhyme and immersive photos offers something quietly powerful: a window. A wide-open, sun-drenched, utterly magnificent window onto a world that is real, that is precious, and that is still there to be seen.
The photographs carry the weight of that world with grace and reverence. The sweet rhyming text deliberately prompts the readers' questions and curiosity. Cheryl Lawton Malone is an acclaimed children's writer and poet with multiple published picture books. Her words pull the reader through the book, gently, like a thread of golden light, creating a sense of time. Together this team created an unmatched immersive experience.
By the last page, after the penguins have marched, played, sunned, and swam, the reader has spent a day in one of the most extraordinary places on Earth. And they will want to go back.
