WHEN ELEPHANT MET GIRAFFE

Loquacious Elephant meets her match in taciturn Giraffe in this debut picture book.

Gude’s flat, cartoonish digital art depicts Elephant heading off for a swim in the first story, “The Water Hole.” When she greets the giraffe and tries to start up a conversation with him and is met only with silence, Elephant is both baffled and offended. She walks off in a huff but then turns to a book (All About Giraffes) to try to understand why he snubbed her. She learns that giraffes “don’t make much noise” and therefore accepts her new acquaintance’s reticent nature. This opens the door for them not only to share the water hole together, but to bake in a story called “Pretzels” and to play dress up in a story called “The Bossy Pirate.” Sly humor punctuates the stories, which inevitably center on conflict arising from the friends’ very different personalities. At first blush, the picture book reads like an early reader in some ways, with its discrete, tightly paced stories and odd-couple characters, but the vocabulary isn’t quite controlled enough to be accessible to independent emergent readers.

A humorous picture book about two new, unlikely pals.