A chance to dance, all over the country. Children with wide smiles lead readers on a transcontinental trip to learn some new dances. In Maine, there’s the Rockland Sock-Hop, Massachusetts has the Boston Tea Party and New Yorkers enjoy the Brooklyn Boogie. And so it goes, from East Coast to West, with demonstrations of the D.C. Freeze, the Miami Mambo, the Dixieland Band, the Makinac Milk Shake (that’s Michigan), the Midwest Wiggle, the Lubbock Line Dance, the Albuquerque Airplane, Elevation Celebration (all over the Rockies), Portland Pogo Stick and Berkeley Buttered Toast. Our two newest states are represented by the Hilo Hula and the Juneau Jitterbug. This superficial survey falls short by emphasizing quantity over quality; more explicit descriptions of the (presumably all fictional) dances with more varied pictures would have been welcome. Haley’s buoyant watercolors depict lively children in a variety of jiggling poses, but aside from stereotypical regional trappings (the Brooklyn Bridge, cowboy hats), there’s no real sense of place. Still, an energetic prompt to get young listeners up and moving—and, best possible outcome, inventing their own dances. (Picture book. 3-6)
