THE WILD, WILD INSIDE

A tale that means to impress with its ingenuity ends up instead presenting a confusing take on what goes on in utero. The notion that babies spend their time eating, sleeping and kicking in the womb is upended by a plucky unborn infant who is quick to correct these assumptions. When this baby isn’t leaping across a stage, it’s driving a spaceship or winning a baseball game. Mommy’s explanations about the baby’s life are all wrong. The one time Mom is right? Only at the end when she says the baby is ready to be born (but here she’s wrong too, as she says the baby is kicking “A LOT” when instead what she’s feeling are contractions, of course). It’s certainly creative, but eschewing the usual new-baby practicalities makes this book just too fanciful and muddling for anxious about-to-be siblings. Certainly Huliska-Beith’s thick paints catch the eye as she cleverly mimics Mommy’s activities with the baby’s imagined adventures, but even so, this effort is likely to provoke a slew of baffled questions with its skewed view into a fetus’s world. (Picture book. 4-8)