I GOT THIS HAT

A peripatetic child shows off an impressive collection of toppers.

This Australian import opens with the image of a conical Asian hat and reads, “I got this hat in China.” The text then proceeds to show other hats the narrator has procured, rhyming them in couplets. The Caucasian child has hats from a “pilot” and “pirate,” a “diver” and a “driver,” and so forth. The text is laid out on one side of each spread in page-filling red letters, half a couplet at a time. The accompanying illustrations show the child’s nose and eyes peeking out from beneath each individual headpiece. It can only be considered unfortunate that the imprecise and unnecessary term “Eskimo” is paired to rhyme with a hat from “Mexico.” The final pages ask, “But to bed I’ll wear which one?” The answer (“NONE!”) features a nearly bald, gap-toothed protagonist that looks rather like an evil cousin to David Shannon’s David. This final image notwithstanding, for the most part the art pulls together and is paired well with the large, hand-drawn and -colored text. There is clear potential within these pages, buried sadly beneath some dismayingly stereotypical choices.

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