I think I can safely call this a successful and easy early nature book. Starting with the city as well it's evident it wants to prove nature-spotting can be done with minimal effort. We start with a chunk about how to do it successfully and safely, and then look at six of Europe's main habitat kinds in order – towns and cities, farms and grasslands, inland waterways, the coasts, forests, and the mountainous. Once we've seen what each offers nature, we then get double-paged spreads galore, not providing us with a welter of information about any particular animal, nor offering a check-list for us to be obsessively thinking of completing, but just suggesting what we might see. Everything is here from the alpine mammals and the coastal waders to the weeds in between our flagstones – and the insects munching on them. All is presented in a youthful (ie higgledy-piggledy) manner, but highly visually, which we can pretty much take for granted with DK books. The biggest quibble will probably be the geographical area this covers – it defines "Northern Europe" as Scandinavia, Benelux, the UK and about a third of France. Not "anything north of the Alps" (which it claims to feature as a biome). Poland is not allowed, and neither are the Balts – it's a weird place that is both too large and too small. That said, it proves hands-down that critter-spotting and some vaguely interesting plants are within arms-reach of all of us in the right spot.