“A mys­te­ri­ous giant squid lurks in the dark cor­ners of the ocean depths. Page-turn by page-turn, parts of the squid are revealed: first, a few ten­ta­cles sweep across the blue/black-hued ocean envi­ron­ment; then, a few more emerge, and then again even more, along with fish who are about to be devoured. (And this is all before the title page.) Sud­den­ly, the squid’s beak is front and cen­ter, and then a huge, star­ing eye. Just as sud­den­ly, the squid dis­ap­pears. Fleming’s cadenced text and Rohmann’s dra­mat­ic illus­tra­tions col­lab­o­rate beau­ti­ful­ly to build sus­pense and move­ment, as the squid and oth­er sea crea­tures bat­tle for sur­vival. Impor­tant sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion sneaks in effort­less­ly: even as read­ers look for the next appear­ance of the squid, they gain knowl­edge of the animal’s feed­ing, breed­ing, and move­ments as well as insights into the many ques­tions about giant squids that are still unan­swered. The art­work is mar­velous; the murky blues and blacks of the ocean make it easy to appre­ci­ate how hard it has been for sci­en­tists and sailors to see the elu­sive squid — and how star­tling it must be when that enor­mous ‘ghost­ly, lid­less’ eye appears. In a spec­tac­u­lar reveal across a four-pan­el fold­out, bil­low­ing clouds of squid ink clear away, and we final­ly see the entire, mag­nif­i­cent ani­mal. Turn to the final pages, and once again ‘it’s gone.’ A dia­gram of the squid’s anato­my, a bib­li­og­ra­phy, and an expla­na­tion of the ways sci­en­tists lit­er­al­ly piece togeth­er infor­ma­tion about squids from body parts that wash ashore fol­low the main text.” (The Horn Book, starred review)