Having led her fellow triplet sisters in a sartorial rebellion in her debut outing (Daffodil, 2004), the intrepid Daffodil returns in an even more vigorous expression of her individuality. Daffodil is sick of being mistaken for her sisters, and she’s even more fed up with being typed as, “A pretty little, clean little flower of a girl.” When her mother makes a papier-mâché crocodile head for her art class, Daffodil expropriates it and assumes a dual identity. With exuberant “Raaa raaa raaa” and “Chomp chomp chomp,” the crocodile wreaks happy mayhem at school, eating its classmates and getting very dirty on the playground. Jenkins gets the desire of the young child to remake herself just right, giving her heroine free rein to explore her new persona. Bogacki’s childlike crayons plumb his characters’ emotional lives with equal accuracy, the simple, moonlike faces enormously expressive, the oversized crocodile head fiercely toothy; Daffodil-as-Crocodile appropriately dominates each spread, either larger than her merely human counterparts or appearing multiple times—or both. A wisely perceptive celebration of a child’s need to define herself. (Picture book. 4-8)
