EELS: The Superpower Field Guide. Written by Rachel Poliquin and illustrated by Nicholas John Frith. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Raincoast. 2020. $12.99 ages 10 and up

" ... "Is there anything more to know?"

You bet your buttons there is! Imagine
this: While this eel is just a baby half
as big as your pinkie finger, she swam
300 million times the length of her body. If I'm doing my math right, and if you're about four feet tall, that's the same as you travelling all the way to the moon! 
"Impossible!" you say.
I say, "You don't know eels."


If you are one of those people who don't know eels, fear not! You soon will. So long as you pick up this book, settle yourself in a chair and spend the next hour or two digesting all of the information provided concerning Olenka, an ordinary eel. Or so you think. In truth, she has many superpowers and you are about to learn all about them.

Here they are: oxygen skin, wall crawling, slimetastic safety shield, double invisibility, shape-shifting, supersecret lair of the abyss, globe-spanning grit, ocean-stealth submarine mode, four-nostriled navigation, and the magnetic head. As she has done in previous superpower field guides (Beavers, Moles, Ostriches), Ms. Poliquin first introduces the subject for her new book. It is evident she has done extensive research. She then moves on to describe, chapter by chapter, each of the amazing traits promised.

I had no idea! I thought of eels in the way I would guess most people think of them: snakelike, drab, rarely seen. Olenka is described in that way, in the beginning.

"Her back is an ordinary fishy-brown color. Her belly is fishy yellow. She's about two and a half feet long (76 centimeters), which is not too big and not too small. In fact, everything about Olenka is perfectly, plainly, boringly ordinary."

NOT! Olenka is a European Eel and her talents are many, and quite literally heroic as you will learn when you read this book. Always informative, never ever boring, it is a reading experience that astonishes with well-researched information and humorous tidbits. If you are a fan of the others in this series, you will not be surprised to be equally impressed while learning about eels.

FYI: The final page has big news! Ms. Poliquin hints that there are more humble heroes on the horizon for us to read about: Barnabus the Warthog, Twombly the Termite and Pepper the Least Weasel. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to meet them.