PEEP!

The author/illustrator of Splash! A Little Book About Bouncing Back (9/08) offers another diminutive dose of biblio–behavior-modeling. Already anxious about a green balloon that seems to be following along, a small chick comes to a curb from which his mother and sisters have already hopped and gets stuck. After several false starts and much urging he nerves himself at last to make the jump, but his triumph is short-lived; not only does the balloon suddenly burst, but then little Peep is left behind again when everyone else hops up over another curb. The new obstacle looks impossibly high in Van Lieshout’s very simple yellow-and-black line drawings, and seeing little Peep in an even more challenging new plight isn’t likely to give very young children a positive impression. Emotions are writ large here despite the small trim size, but fear-dispellers like Jane Simmons’s Come Along, Daisy! (1998) or Martin Waddell’s Tiny’s Big Adventure, illustrated by John Lawrence (2004), will provide more convincing reassurance. (Picture book. 4-6)