CUB AND BAT

After a bear cub fails to extract honey from a hive, his bat friend has an idea.

Cub is an enterprising, if naive, black bear with a golden snout. Bat, rendered in turquoise and black, hovers above the action, watching with increasing concern as Cub piles a cardboard box on top of a garbage bin to achieve a greater height. This precarious arrangement is loaded onto a toy cab that is attached to a string and placed under the beehive. Wooden spoon in paw, Cub ascends the makeshift ladder, only to fall without retrieving the prize. His approach—wanting “to rob the bees”—results in heartache: “Bad job. Cub sobbed.” But Bat’s idea—approaching the bees politely—leads to a tasty treat and a valuable lesson for Cub. These winsome characters are set against single-colored backgrounds, making the controlled vocabulary, thought bubbles, and short dialogs easy to decipher. The action lines and dynamic compositions add energy to the simple plot, and the images offer relevant clues for decoding the text. 

A sweet and solid story for emerging readers.