Rollie-Rollie. Scary Grand Entry.

A young Caribbean boy meets a fantastical friend in this early reader.

Karl has big dreams: He wants to beat the island’s best runner in the 200-meter sprint and then go on to run in the Olympics. He even feels his feet cross the finish line—but, alas, he wakes up and realizes it was just a dream. Karl has a mysterious friend, however, a rolling calf named Rollie-Rollie, who appears in a terrifying “grand entrance” with the sounds of clanking iron chains—a “mad beast sprint[ing] toward Karl with fire blazing from its mouth.” In his Caribbean patois, Rollie-Rollie promises to train Karl for the Olympics: “Boy, if yuh let me be yuh coach, we could win any race on earth.” Rollie-Rollie also makes, and keeps, another promise to Karl: He will appear to his family and friends in the town square so they don’t think Karl is crazy. Along with Karl and Rollie, there are about a dozen characters in this 34-page book, most of whom are nothing but names. Some of them participate in brief vignettes that lack context: Ben takes Leonard on a walk to find mangoes; Junior strikes up a romance with a girl named Mona, etc. Readers learn nothing more and can only guess that their personalities and circumstances will be introduced in other books in the series. Yet Brown and Brown (A Turbulent Road to Heaven, 2013, etc.) pack the story with details evocative of island life: the town turning out for a footrace; eating callaloo, ackee and salt fish for breakfast; a trip to the well to fill up water drums; washing clothes by the river—even the rolling calf himself is a common spirit in island folklore, though usually not a friendly one. The book ends with a parable told by Essie, the children’s mother figure, and a moral—one will never regret a job well done—that is as disconnected as the other parts of the story.

The setting comes alive in this easy chapter book, even if the characters don’t.