OVER IN THE MEADOW

The animal cast of this 19th-century counting rhyme has been subject to many variations; here, Vojtech (Tough Beginnings: How Baby Animals Survive, 2001, etc.) chooses a set and arranges them on oversized pages in intimate gatherings of smiling, smoothly painted single-parent families. She places them into an idyllic meadow scattered with appropriate numbers of bugs, flowers, and other items for enthusiastic young counters to enumerate. There’s no musical arrangement for the odd parent who doesn’t already know the tune, and despite mother beaver’s order to “beave,” her ten offspring are shown asleep—but children will find this rendition easier on the eye than the frantic Langstaff/Rojankovsky edition (1957, 1985), or Ezra Jack Keats’s self-consciously arty version (1971). (Picture book. 4-6)