MY COOL RED HAT
by Nahrain Taylor illustrated by Arsalan
A child takes a beloved hat everywhere—and puts it on a variety of animals—in this picture book for emergent readers.
“I love my hat, my red hat,” begins Taylor’s narrator, a light-skinned child with long black hair. The cloche bowler hat features a white ribbon and a flower and appears on almost every page. Throughout, Arsalan’s cartoonlike full-color illustrations focus tightly on the child and hat rather than on other characters and objects. The narrator puts the chapeau in a box, then in the tub, where it gets wet. The child is dismayed, but with Mom’s help, the hat is soon dry and ready for adventures involving a cat, a bee, an ant, zoo animals, and a farm’s cow. The scenery changes effectively imply that the events happen over multiple days. Youngsters may worry when the hat is blown away by the wind, but the narrator quickly regains it in the following spread. Taylor’s choice to use simple words, repeated multiple times, may put older readers in mind of classic P.D. Eastman titles. Kindergarten sight words abound, and only two (love and from) are longer than three letters. For beginning readers, this simplicity is sure to feel empowering.
A lightweight tale with encouraging, accessible prose.