DO BUNNIES TALK?

From the author of Wheel Away (1989), an ebullient survey of sounds. On a typical page, animals are creatively mixed with other noisemakers: ``Horses NEIGH/Pigs OINK/Pogo sticks go/BOINK/BOINK/BOINK''; in the varied refrain, ``quiet little bunnies don't make a peep'' or ``never speak.'' The verse is precisely cadenced and amusingly phrased. Most of the verbal representations are familiar; those that aren't are plausible facsimiles of the sounds they portray. Dubanevich's cartoon-style illustrations, with boldly clashing areas of flat color, add a lot to the humor; the large sans serif type echoes her sturdy black line for an unusually well-integrated visual effect. An entertaining vehicle for tuning young ears; with its reiteration of the theme of the bunnies' silence, it may even serve to settle a group down at the beginning of a program. (It's not true that rabbits are incapable of sound—as James Stephens dramatized in a haunting poem, ``The Snare''—but it would be unnecessarily curmudgeonly to point that out, so we won't.) (Picture book. 3-7)