The LEGO Zoo is divided up into five chapters, and each chapter adds a little complexity. Each of the animals in this book come with a complete list of parts and building instructions, as well as a brief blurb about each animal and the occasional hints about some new building technique to which the reader should pay careful attention.
Builds in the early chapters include animals like a crocodile made primarily of plates, a fly with posable legs, and a beaver. It also contains a chicken model with a surprising number of SNOT techniques to add on the wings, tail, beak, and eyes. The book then goes on to more complex models that build on the earlier lessons. The spider and scorpion models take the fly's legs to a new level, while the praying mantis shows that not everything has to line up on a grid, and many other models like the bull and gorilla show a couple of ways to make heads using SNOT methods.
The final two chapters are filled with more complex models that use many more parts with some interesting attention to detail. While these builds will still feel really blocky, they do smooth off some of the harder edges from earlier in the book. For example, a cow model is shown that uses tiles to make spots on the top and side, while a flamingo model is provided that keeps the slender look of the animal and shows an interesting technique for building the bird's iconic standing style. I especially liked the sheep in these later chapters as it used a lot of studs pointing in every direction to give the fluffy feel that you would expect.
Before The LEGO Zoo wraps up its 50 different animals, it will show the reader how to make the large plumage of a peacock and the pattern of a butterfly wing. It will also show a method for making the tight curl of a seahorse tale and take the posable legs from before to an extreme in an octopus model.
All-in-all, The LEGO Zoo: 50 Easy-to-Build Animals provides a wide variety of instructions and shows off many techniques for someone wanting to learn some basic LEGO building methods that don't involve a lot of detail work. The book is well organized and structured in a way that allows for the building of knowledge and techniques, but there were a few issues. Besides the occasional typo, I found one set of instructions that had one step doubled on top of itself (the spider) and another that appeared to change what a previous step had done (the koala). While the first just made me try and decide if I was expected to add a lot more pieces than I thought, the second would have meant a bit of undoing of the build and correcting the previous step in order to proceed because blocks just wouldn't have lined up otherwise. As an Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL), this isn't really an issue for me, but given that this book is obviously geared towards a younger audience, I can see how it might cause some confusion and potential frustration.
All that being said, The LEGO Zoo is still a good starting point if the LEGO fan wants to do more than just build off of the instructions in the box or build from their mind. If the reader is looking to expand into some beginner techniques, then this is a good book to pick up, as I've rarely seen a book published on this particular level of instruction.
