Maretha at Fauna Park Tales

The Cheetah and the Dog by Patricia Furstenberg

This little book is a worthy addition to children’s author, Patricia Furstenberg’s amazing and fast growing repertoire! Thanks Robbie Cheedle for this beautiful review. I’m reblogging your page to my blog at Fauna Park Tales.

Robbie's inspiration

Children's book reviews

What Amazon says

New 2019 Edition with added bonus: Amazing Cheetah fact, with adorable real-life pictures

Why do cheetahs need to live in the wild?
Why should cheetah hunt a bigger prey?
How were cheetah built to live in the wild?

A perfect gift, a story books for 3-5 years, a wonderful bedtime story for toddlers, a great read for grandparents.

“The Cheetah and the Dog by Patricia Furstenberg, like her other animal story books, is inspired by the real life story of Kasi the cheetah and Mtani the Labrador dog and their friendship. The story gives insight on the importance of friendship. Kasi and Mtani meet by accident one hot day on Africa’s wild plains.
Though they both looked different, they liked to chase each other and hide in the dust. One day while playing, they see a rabbit and they decide to run after the rabbit. Later they…

View original post 486 more words

Published by Maretha at Fauna Park Tales

Maretha is a South African Italian, born in a small town called Montagu. She grew up in nearby Worcester in the Western Cape – a town reminiscent of living in Switzerland among the snow-capped mountains. Worcester had a small library. Young Maretha’s visits were limited to three times a week, because the librarian told her, “You spend too much time with your nose in a book and neglect your school work.” Nothing much has changed, because she's still a confirmed bookworm who constantly strives to raise more bookworms who enjoy reading, not just as a pleasant past-time, but as an excellent tool to be used when grown-up. Before immigrating to the UK to settle in Lancashire, Maretha worked as a librarian in a private school in Botswana, where one of her tasks was to encourage children to enjoy reading. That was a labour of love for this bookworm, providing valuable help in carving her own career as a children's author/illustrator. It brought her face to face with the literary industry’s toughest critics – children and preteens. She saw that many students also enjoyed reading about birds and animals, their care, habitats and general well-being, especially when a few added catchy rhymes here and there made reading sessions interesting and alive. In 2012 her job was localised and as things often happen, this unforeseen occurrence led to a new chapter in her life. To remain motivated, she wrote down everything she could remember about her family's pets – their little habits and characteristics. For example, the character of the working-dog hero in Fauna Park Tales is based on the different traits of every single dog her family ever owned. Researching habits, habitats and interesting titbits about martial eagles and eagle owls, as well as many smaller birds such as crimson-breasted shrikes and hoopoes,made it easier to illustrate them and tell a believable story. Her illustrations appear throughout Fauna Park Tales. Maretha Botha admits to being a chocoholic and unreformed coffee addict, a keen gardener and bird watcher, who likes to walk on the moors where the stiff breeze coming in from the sea, quickly clears her head, making way for more inspiration.

3 comments

Leave a Reply to Fauna Park Tales Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.