Marmosets

SLJ’s Best of 2016–Quick, Little Monkey!

Posted by on Jan 6, 2017 in Book: Quick Little Monkey, Marmosets, PIcture Books, Reviews | 0 comments

research, marmosetSo happy to learn that Quick, Little Monkey! is on School Library Journal’s list of the best children’s books of 2016. “Only a monster could look into those eyes and tell this book it couldn’t be on a Best of the Year list,” the reviewer says. This is how I feel about that!

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Sometimes in the Grocery Store

Posted by on Sep 2, 2016 in Author Visits, Book: Quick Little Monkey, Marmosets, Promotion | 0 comments

Almost exactly four ounces. But I went with a lime in the end.

Almost exactly four ounces. But I went with a lime in the end.

When you’re a writer of children’s books, sometimes it happens that you go to the grocery store and start weighing various pieces of fruit. You do this because you are searching for one that weighs between four and five ounces, which happens to be  the weight of an adult pygmy marmoset.

You need to know the weight of an adult pygmy marmoset because there is one in your book, Quick, Little Monkey. And you’re going to a library to do a book presentation, and you want to give the children something they can actually hold so they can really get how tiny these primates are.

So you weigh all the fruit, and you take a picture because this is kind of funny and maybe you’ll write about it in your blog. And you discover that a lime is precisely the weight that you need. And that’s about when you notice the couple next to you eying you and edging discreetly away.

You consider explaining that you are photographing and weighing fruit because you’re looking for something that is the same weight as an adult pygmy marmoset, but you decide that won’t help.

So you go and pay for your lime. And you get some chocolate too. Because.

#writingisweird

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Pygmy Marmosets Go To War

Posted by on Jul 19, 2016 in Book: Quick Little Monkey, Marmosets | 0 comments

A killer stalks the treetops of the amazon….pygmy marmosets (like the heroine of Quick, Little Monkey!) may seem like mere fluffy cuteness, but they’re relentless in search of a meal. Don’t mess with the pygmy!

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Marmoset Madness

Posted by on Jul 1, 2016 in Book: Quick Little Monkey, Marmosets | 0 comments

research, marmoset

Marmosets rule!

Really, there’s just something so appealing about these little cuties, the superheroes of my rainforest adventure, Quick, Little Monkey! It’s the fuzz, I think…and the big eyes…and of course the tininess. A full-grown adults weighs about as much as a stick of butter. How adorable is that?

Some other fun marmoset facts:

• Yep, they really are monkeys. In fact, they are the world’s smallest true monkey.
• The adults are tiny, as mentioned above…and a baby is about the size of grown-up human’s thumb
• They can leap fifteen feet in one bound. Amazing!
• A group of monkeys is called a troop. (This always makes me imagine them in red uniforms and big hats, like a marching band.
• Pygmy marmosets are omnivores, but their favorite food is tree sap. They’ll digs holes in a tree’s bark with their teeth and lap up the sap. (New word for the day: gummivore. An animal that eats sap. Really, it’s a word.)
• And, just like in my book, father marmosets do most of the childcare. They carry the youngest babies piggyback and bring them back to their mothers to be nursed.

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