Learn all about alpacas in both North and South America in this rhyming nonfiction picture book full of these darling fluffy friends!
Alpacas here, alpacas there depend on people for their care.
Thousands of years ago, people living high in the Andes Mountains of South America domesticated alpacas from wild animals. Today, millions of alpacas are still raised in the Andes, but alpaca farming has also spread to North America and around the world. Find out all there is to know about the lives of alpacas, here, there, and everywhere!
Tillotson, Carrie. Alpacas Here, Alpacas There. United States, Beach Lane Books, 2025.
Cute, cozy, and rather relentlessly informative. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, glossary, selected sources)(Informational picture book. 6-9)
Alpacas Here, Alpacas There
Reviews
2024-10-12
An introduction to the shaggy, big-eyed, impossibly appealing alpaca.As Tillotson points out, alpacas are raised for their warm fleeces in both their native South America and in North America. To reinforce that connection, the paired illustrations show them being raised, tended, and shorn in similar ways side by side on hilly Andean meadows and in flatter, grassier, fenced-in fields. In both settings, long-necked adults and their little crias fetchingly flock, nuzzle, or gambol springily as the author barrages readers and listeners with basic facts, presented in appropriately bouncy rhymes and parallel blocks of smaller-type prose, all capped by further historical and husbandry notes at the end. It’s a heavy info-load, though delivered with infectious enthusiasm. Readers learn that alpacas were domesticated thousands of years ago in the Andes from their camelid cousin vicuñas and that they bear coats of 16 official colors in North America and 22 in South America, which are regularly removed without harm to the animals. Unlike sheep’s wool, alpaca fleece requires no chemical processing before being spun. The smiling human figures that Peru-born Chavarri slips into her outdoorsy scenes alternate between racially diverse ranchers in the north and, in the south, brown-skinned herders dressed in a mix of modern and traditionally designed and patterned fabrics in a variety of bright colors and earth tones.
Cute, cozy, and rather relentlessly informative. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, glossary, selected sources)(Informational picture book. 6-9)
Kirkus Reviews
