Honu and Blue’s Sealife Clues
 Jez Smith  Ill. Ned Barraud

 

 

Honu and Blue’s Sealife Clues        
 Jez Smith  Ill. Ned Barraud
Scholastic (2025)
Picture book, 34 pages
ISBN 978 0 77543920 2 

           

 

 

 

This lovely picture book is a series of fishy puzzles told in verse. A companion volume to Pu and Ru’s Bird Beak Clues (2024), it features Honu, a turtle, and Blue, a Kororā or Little blue penguin. These two seafarers provide witty banter and some terrible word play (beloved by young readers) while Jez Smith poses his puzzles in verse.

The layout of Honu and Blue’s Sealife Clues is crafty. On each of the odd pages, Jez Smith offers a four-line verse mystery for readers to unravel:

‘This curious creature is called a horse,

but it swims with fins, not hooves of course.

It has no mane to swoosh and swish.

Because this horse is in fact a fish.’

Turn the page and the solution is revealed in both words and pictures. The seahorse is an easy one to guess but Honu and Blue also pop up with their facts and jokes, which make the newly-obtained information easy to remember.

‘Seahorses are rellies of pipefish and seadragons’

The stars of the book include the Paddle crab, Fairy tern, Longfin eel, Maui’s dolphin, snapper, octopus, Royal albatross, Orca and Great white shark [Mangō taniwha]. Of course, there are also entries for the Leatherback turtle [Honu] and the little Blue penguin [Kororā]. Māori names are provided for all entries.

 Talented wildlife artist, Ned Barraud, has created dramatic colour pictures of the creatures both above and below the water. The first page for each creature is craftily designed so that only a hint of its identity is given. Thus, the baby fur seals are concealed by the waterfall where they are playing. [This scene is a popular New Zealand tourist attraction, near Kaikoura.] Guess what the octopus hides behind.

Honu and Blue also offer a couple of pages of practical advice on how young readers can help protect the sea and its inhabitants. For example, dolphins are susceptible to a disease spread in cat droppings: ‘Don’t flush cat poo down the loo, it spreads disease into the seas,’ warns Honu.

Designed by Vida Kelly, Honu and Blue’s Sealife Clues, is a beautiful and cheerful introduction to some of the creatures found in the sea that surrounds us,     

 

 Trevor Agnew 
5 Mar 2026 [Review 3824]