With their father “illy-ally-o-ing” on a salty sail around the world and their mother busy “Arting” up in the wheelhouse of their floating home, the Bullfrog, twins Bik (the faster one) and Mokie (the bigger one) are left to “slip slide slipper” their way over the docks in search of adventures large and small. Bean’s line drawings adorn nearly every page of Orr’s rollicking, fancifully worded narrative with close-up scenes of the lad and lass monkeying about under the not-always-watchful eyes of their industrious nanny Ruby, their shaggy old “sleepdog,” Laddie, and stout “fisk”-catching neighbor Erik the Viking. Ending with the triumphal return of their long-awaited Dad, bearing a “soggy waggly scrabbly shaggy licky round black waggles” to keep Laddie company, this set of splishy-splashy episodes will itself draw waggles from easy-reader graduates and read-aloud audiences in general. (Fiction. 8-10)
