WHAT'S A BANANA?

Two award winners pair wordplay and food play.

In very simple illustrations, Pizzoli, who won the Geisel Medal for The Watermelon Seed (2013), gives two children of color pets, basic props, and bananas to employ as Singer, winner of a Cybil Award for Mirror, Mirror, illustrated by Josée Masse (2010), directs. “You can grip it / and unzip it. / Smash and mash it with a spoon. // You can trace it. / Outer-space it— / make believe that it’s the moon.” Eventually, though, after toting it, floating it, and pretending it’s a flute, she suggests one more way to enjoy it: “Don’t forget that it’s a fruit!” Likewise, in the co-published What’s an Apple? a brown-skinned lad and a blonde, white playmate “pick” and “kick” apples, “snuggle,” “juggle,” and “bob,” but also slice, dip in caramel, and make the fruit into a pie. The final scene, in which the children, dressed in vacuum suits, exchange apples on the lunar surface, rather begs the closing claim that “You can eat it anyplace.” But children, at least, will find chopped logic a bland, dry alternative to the juicy rhymes and sweet subject matter.

Quick but savory fare, both sonic and visual, for pre- or newly independent readers.