I SAW A BULLFROG

Stern showcases unusual facility at naturalistic depiction, but like the 11 imaginary animal hybrids that appear here, the result overall is neither fish nor fowl. Though she smoothly carries off the melding of bull and frog into “bullfrog,” and tiger and shark into “tiger shark,” other combinations, such as those for the goose barnacle, the deer mouse, and the rat snake, look like cut-and-paste jobs. Nor is there consistency in the accompanying verses, either in quality—“I saw a bullfrog perched on a lily. / He was bigger than it, so he looked sort of silly”—or in message, as some are straight descriptions, some speculate about whether the animals would use one set of mismatched appendages or the other, and some earnestly make the point that the creature opposite doesn’t really exist. Stern closes with small black-and-white portraits of the actual animals, plus a few facts. The failure here is not in quality of art, but of imagination; next to Jack Prelutsky’s Scranimals, or Sarah Perry’s If— (1995), too many of these creations just fall flat. (Picture book. 6-8)