Review: Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies

Title: Bats At the Beach
Author: Brian Lies
Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
Published: May 8, 2006
Pages: 32
Genre: Ages 6 on up
Review: paperback from library
Buy Links: Amazon, Amazon.uk 

Quick, call out! Tell all you can reach: the night is just perfect for bats at the beach!

So pack your buckets, banjos, and blankets—don’t forget the moon-tan lotion—and wing with this bunch of fuzzy bats to where foamy sea and soft sand meet.

Brian Lies’s enchanting art and cheery beachside verse will inspire bedtime imaginations again and again. Come visit a bedazzling world of moonlight, firelight, and . . . bats!

K and I found this book to be funny. Bats on the beach really how can that be? You have bats who come out at night but instead of just eating insects and what not they go to the beach to have fun. They play in the sand, have bug-mallows, surf and other fun things. It is just a normal night on the beach for these fun bats. Though you know when daylight hits they have to return home as bats are not suppose to be out in the sun. Overall a very enjoyable book to read with your young kids if they are not afraid of bats. The pictures are not scary just silly.

I was born in 1963 in Princeton, New Jersey, which back then was a quiet college town, surrounded by old farmland slowly giving way to housing developments. I spent a lot of time building dams and forts in the woods across the street with my best friend, inventing things, and writing and drawing with my older sister. At various times during my childhood, we had newts, gerbils and rabbits as pets. When I was in fifth grade, an author and illustrator visited my school, and I was amazed that one could have a job writing and drawing. I wished it could be my job! But I didn’t think I was good enough at either writing or drawing to even try.
I had always liked to draw, though, and kept doing it just for fun. During high school, I also painted with oil paints and made stained glass windows. I actually sold some, too—my first taste of self-employment. I went to Brown University after high school, where I studied Psychology and British and American Literature. I began to think about what I really wanted to do for a career, and what I really wanted was something that involved art. So after graduation from college in 1985, I moved to Boston to study drawing and painting at the Boston Museum School (also known as the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
At the Museum School, I started getting paintings in exhibitions and won a few prizes, and then was able to get political illustrations published in the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe.
Suddenly I had a career as an editorial and political illustrator, working with a lot of magazines and newspapers. In 1989, I illustrated my first book, Flatfoot Fox and the Case of the Missing Eye, with Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston.
Since then, I've illustrated some twenty books, including my newest one, Bats at the Library, which I also wrote. My other three written-and-illustrated books to date are the New York Times bestseller, Bats at the Beach, Hamlet and the Enormous Chinese Dragon Kite, and Hamlet and the Magnificent Sandcastle.
I also get lots of work published in Cricket, Spider, Ladybug and Babybug magazines, and I enjoy visiting schools to work with students on writing and illustrating stories.
I live in a seaside town in Massachusetts with my wife, my daughter, two cats and a hamster. My hobbies are bicycling, woodworking, and tending a big vegetable garden behind the house. I’m very interested in old-fashioned food preparation, too, and sometimes make my own cheese, kimchi and other things (including a drink called switchel, which I kind of liked but which everybody else in my family thought was nasty).
I also read a lot, which I think is important—it keeps my imagination going, and leaves me feeling much more relaxed than television does!