ROCK IT, SOCK IT, NUMBER LINE

Martin rocks on with his current collaborator (Adam, Adam What Do You See?, not reviewed, etc.), in a garden-themed counting book obviously intended as a companion to the ever-popular Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (1989). Large numerals interact with jolly dancing vegetables, counting up to ten and back down again until they hop into a cooking pot, creating vegetable soup with numerals instead of alphabet letters for a boy and girl who are the “king and queen” of the garden. The rhyme scheme is similar to that of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, but in this case a few of the rhymes are a bit forced and stretch too hard for excitement that isn’t really there in the lineup of numbers. A few of the vegetables won’t be familiar to most kids (okra and eggplant), and watermelon is also included with the vegetables, which will send some puzzled readers to the encyclopedia—horticulturists consider watermelon a vegetable. Cahoon’s computer-generated illustrations offer appealing vegetables with bright-eyed grins and humorous touches such as sunglasses and tiny dotted arms and legs. Although this effort doesn’t quite match the magic of Martin’s best work, these dancing numbers and veggies will fit right in to story hours with themes of gardens, soup, or counting. (Picture book. 3-6)