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HOW TO CATCH A CROCODILE by Robert Pack

HOW TO CATCH A CROCODILE

By

Publisher: Knopf

There's not much to catching a crocodile -- it's all in the way you look at it. Billy Bell's method is to set off with a dull book, a pair of tweezers, a matchbox and binoculars. The crocodile is lured to the river bank with a sign that says ""Toothpicks for Sale"" and falls asleep over the book; Billy looks at him through the wrong end of the binoculars, es the reduced image, picks that up with tweezers and carries it home from Egypt in the match box. If the solution seems rather labored, so are most juvenile jokes and this one builds through the rhyme and pictures. The rhyme scheme is in couplets and, unfortunately, too many of them are forced for ease in reading aloud. The illustrations are in three colors, used inconsistently -- some pages fairly jangle with it and others get just a bit. The artist has a real flair for stylized animals; her crocodile has a solid, leathery look. Her human figures are insubstantial outlines in comparison, awkwardly touched with color, contrasting poorly with some of the heavily painted crocodile scenes.