TURTLE WITH A TOOLBOX

Make no mistake: This reptile means business.

“Turtle has a toolbox for a shell. / It’s filled with tools that he knows well.” Ferry hooks the youngest readers from the get-go with her bite-size, rhythmically faultless rhymes charting Turtle’s progress as he toils away on a mystery project (spoiler: it’s a tree house) in a grassy open space. The text is filled with onomatopoeia as the smiling Turtle, who walks on his back legs, gets to work (“Here is his hammer. / Bang. Bang. Bang. / Here is his mallet. / Clang. Clang. Clang”). In this salute to teamwork, various animals are happy to help Turtle with the job, among them a hummingbird who’s a constant presence as he works; a toothy beaver (“Here is the lumber. / Gnaw. Gnaw. Gnaw”), whose tail makes a nifty brush (“Plaster walls up nice and tight”); and a hedgehog who holds a flashlight so Turtle can give the completed tree house some pizzazz (“Hang a string / of lights so bright”). Dudolf’s gentle cartoons depict an utterly adorable all-animal cast; these characters aren’t hard to picture in plush-toy incarnations. He largely sticks with a suitably outdoorsy palette, though he relies on a broader color spectrum for the balloons and party hats seen at the tree house’s grand opening, when “Up, up, up climb all their friends, / and that’s the way this story ends.”

Just what the toddler ordered.