Zulal Ayture-Scheele

"Beautiful Origami," covers a wide variety of origami projects about how to create a wide variety of animals, perfect for children ages 10-12. The author seems well qualified to write about the topic, as she is an author of ten other origami books. Each direction is simple and straightforward, and instead of having a drawing of how to do a certain step as in most origami books, each step is provided with a photo of how the folded piece should look like at that point. The content is well show more organized with the projects being grouped by the environment each animal lives in, i.e., "The Sky" and "The Sea."

However, the issue with this book is that although it is diverse in the kinds of animals shown, the "Fantasy World" and "Zoo" sections can be construed as displaying stereotypes. For example, the peacock and the kangaroo were grouped in the Zoo section, but why couldn't those projects be in the "Sky," "Meadow," or "Jungle" sections? The author could have left the Zoo section out. Also, the "Fantasy World" includes a dinosaur, witch, and unicorn - there could have been a "Prehistoric" section dedicated to dinosaurs, and mythical creatures and beings should not have been included at all.

Could be a great table book. show less

I bought this book as a child and I had barrels of fun with it. The projects are simple enough for a child to do, but complex enough to fuel one's creativity.

This book has very clear instructions with photographs instead of those line drawings where you can't even tell what side of the paper you're on. It goes through all of the basic shapes with projects for each one, and a couple of projects of a more difficult nature at the end.

This is a decent basic origami book for a beginner. It would be a nice gift with several packs of origami paper along with it. However, if the person already knows how to do basic folds, it's too basic.