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HIDE & SEEK

Delicate, rickety, and very droll watercolors inject this buoyant tale with real presence. “I hide. You seek,” says a little trembling mouse to a bespectacled older woman, who may well not even know of the mouse’s existence. Then, in a twist on “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” the mouse makes off to hide from the woman. “1, 2. Tiptoe shoe. 3, 4. Creep to door. 5, 6. Old door sticks. 7, 8 Spy a crate. 9, 10. Quick! Dive in!” (That quote stretches across 10 pages, text written in huge letters across the bottom of each page, numbers on one side, words on the other.) The woman, who has been trying to discern where little squeaks are coming from (“Ready or not! Here I come!”), approaches the crate just when the mouse is taking a peek over the edge. Aye carumba! Here a giant nose and eyes face the mouse who’s about the size of the nose. The lady bolts and the mouse figures the game is afoot. “You leap, I shriek!” he squeaks. A slim tale, but clever and comical in how the mouse pulls the woman into the game. One can almost hear the shrieks of laughter from the audience. Tilley’s artwork is an enormous plus, with fine, wobbly lines and an up-close-and-personal point of view. (Picture book. 2-4)

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-531-30302-0

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Orchard

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

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LOVEBLOCK

From the Block Books series

Fun format; bland text.

A hefty board book filled with ruminations on the nature of love.

While love is the topic of this board book, it’s the inventive gatefolds and charmingly vintage illustrations that readers will fall for. Brimming with sweeping declarations along the lines of “Love is / strong. // You have my back and I’ll always have yours,” the text sounds like a series of greeting cards strung together. It’s benign enough, but are most toddlers interested in generic proclamations about love? Some statements, like the ones on “unsinkable” hippos or a panda parent holding a cub “steady,” could introduce new vocabulary. At least there’s plenty of winsome critters to fawn over as the surprisingly sturdy flaps tell dramatic little ministories for each cartoon-style animal species. A downcast baby giraffe looks longingly up at a too-high tasty branch; lift a flap to bring an adult giraffe—and the delicacy—down to the baby, or watch an adventurous young fox retreat into a fold-down–flap burrow to learn that “my heart will always be home with you.” At points, the pages are tricky to turn in the correct order, but clever touches, like a series of folds that slow readers down to a sloth’s speed, make up for it. The book concludes with a gatefold revealing a vibrant playground populated with racially and ethnically diverse humans; two are wheelchair users.

Fun format; bland text. (Board book. 2-4)

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3153-2

Page Count: 84

Publisher: Abrams Appleseed

Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021

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TEN ON A TWIG

Who knew that turning the pages could be the best part of a book?

Counting down one by one, 10 birds fall off a branch.

The concept of this picture book is simple enough: 10 birds topple, slip, and dive their way off the titular twig until there is one left. The text itself echoes familiar singsong-y children’s rhymes like “Five Little Pumpkins.” While it mostly succeeds, there are some awkward spots: “5 on a twig, there used to be more… / SNAP! Don’t say a word, now there are four.” (On each page the number is both spelled out and represented as a numeral). The real scene stealer, however, is the book’s interplay between Cole’s illustrations and the physical pages themselves. In much the same way Eric Carle utilizes the pages in The Very Hungry Caterpillar to show the little critter eating its way through the week, Cole uses pages of increasing width to show how the twig grows shorter as each bird falls and marches off purposefully with the others, all headed toward verso with pieces of twig in their beaks. Stylistically, the book is captivating. The very colorful, egg-shaped birds appear on a single, thin black line on a stark white background. This backdrop stands in powerful contrast to the book’s final two pages, which are set against black negative space, a theme echoed in the book’s feather-print endpapers. The heavy, thick pages make it easy for little hands to participate. The text takes a back seat to the playful and compelling design, which is sure to delight readers.

Who knew that turning the pages could be the best part of a book? (Picture book. 2-4)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-72821-593-8

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020

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