SAVING THE GHOST OF THE MOUNTAIN
By Sy Montgomery
Photographs by Nic Bishop
Houghton Mifflin, 2009
Category: Middle-grade Nonfiction
My kids like to joke that I could never write the sorts of books Sy Montgomery writes … and they may be right. SNAKE SCIENTIST? Um, no thanks. TARANTULA SCIENTIST? I don’t exactly love hairy spiders. QUEST FOR THE TREE KANGAROO? I thought so for a moment or two, but then I noticed a blood-sucking cloud forest leech attached to a human arm, quite possibly the author’s human arm, in the first chapter. I’m out.
I’m a different sort of adventurer, I guess.
But, oh how I love to imagine Sy and her intrepid partner-in-images, Nic Bishop, as they trek around the planet having crazy exciting and somewhat dangerous adventures, bringing back stories of science and conservation. In SAVING THE GHOST OF THE MOUNTAIN, author and photographer traveled to Mongolia to help track the elusive snow leopard. They climbed up, hiked over, and slid down mountains, searching all the while for leopards and, failing that, leopard scat. The book is irresistible and satisfying, despite the unpredictable nature of those ghostlike cats.
I admire Sy’s moxie, but I also admire her sensibilities, as evidenced in these lines, my favorites in the entire book:
Protecting an animal is like loving someone. It’s not something you do and then finish. It’s a long-term promise, honored over and over, one step at a time.”
Amen to that.
For those who don’t know, Mondays are reserved for celebrating children’s nonfiction in the online kidlit world. You can read more about this celebration here on Anastasia Suen’s Picture Book of the Day blog, and you can find a roundup of today’s Nonfiction Monday posts here at the SimplyScience Blog.