BILLIONS OF BUGS

We stopped counting somewhere between the 70 baby spiders and the 90 ants, and indeed there is nothing in Petie's droning rhymed catalogue or her pictures to make the effort seem worthwhile. Beginning with ""I praying mantis eating a grub"" and ""10 walking sticks hide in a shrub,"" she counts by 10s up to ""100 yellow jackets nest in the ground,"" then by 100s to ""900 no-see-ums in a tropical swarm"" and ""1000 butterflies fly south where it's warm."" The absence of parallelism in the rhyming phrases is only a small irritation compared to the complete absence of care or imagination in evidence here. Squash it.