Little Black Dots on the Fence
圍籬上的小黑點
Overview
Rights Sold: simplified Chinese
In our everyday lives, we’re surrounded by creatures large and small, and if we look closely, we’ll see that their lives are full of surprises. This book features one of the most common species of ants in Taiwan (gray-black spiny ants) as the protagonist to bring readers into a world of fascinating creatures.
Have you ever seen an orderly row of black dots in the park, or on a fence or a pile of waste? Gray-black spiny ants are a species of ant commonly found in Taiwan who live all around us, so keep your eyes peeled as you make your way through this book and see how they cooperate with aphids and compete with other insects, as well as how they forage, work, and have families so their population multiplies over generations.
With the lifecycle of the ants serving as the main book’s main storyline, the authors use vivid language and scientific illustrations rendered in realistic brushstrokes to guide readers through the natural ecology of the gray-black spiny ants. They hope that by the end of the story, young readers will start to love and understand the natural world and respect all the tiny lives within it.
Size: 25.6 x 23.5 cm
Author(s)
Huang Han-Yau (⿈瀚嶢) loves to observe nature and thought he had to go to the mountains to experience it before he realized that the city is its own kind of wilderness. With the exception of a few places that he visits on a regular basis, he can’t remember the locations of almost any of the shops he’s been to, but he’s gradually drawn a map of the city that feels like it belongs to him. There are buried irrigation canals, disappearing courtyard houses with vegetable gardens, old city walls, treelined streets, formerly prosperous neighborhoods, old trees, ferns, birds’ nests, termite nests, and stray cats. Since then, he has been living inside that map and is constantly trying to re-draw those invisible paths and landmarks with words, illustrations, and commentary, so that his friends can travel there too. His narrative non-fiction book The Lost River won the Taiwan Literature Award in 2023.
Born in 1992 in Hsinchu, Wang Ling-Hsuan (王凌軒) studied life sciences in Taipei and started to unearth her inner feral child as soon as she stepped into an ecology lab. Drawing has not only shaped the way she perceives things and creates narratives but has also been a good way to meet people. However, even before that, drawing was a source of never-ending joy for her. She had first been fascinated by the written depictions of the wilderness, then as she slowly got to understand the reality of nature, she felt a deep kinship towards it and wanted to use stories and beautiful illustrations to pull children into the magical world of living creatures.