It’s an Orange Aardvark! By
Michael Hall. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $17.99.
Hooray for Hat! By Brian Won.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.
Count on the Subway. By Paul
Dubois Jacobs & Jennifer Swender. Illustrated by Dan Yaccarino. Knopf.
$14.99.
My Bus. By Byron Barton.
Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $16.99.
Strange, off-kilter and
funny, these books are celebrations of creativity as well as just plain fun to
read. Michael Hall’s It’s an Orange
Aardvark! has a design as delightful as its story: holes punched in the
pages reveal colors on following pages, illustrating a tale in which carpenter
ants (the supposed makers of the holes) try to figure out what is happening
outside their stump – with one particularly pessimistic ant coming up with a
whole series of doomsday scenarios, each building on the last. The first color
discovered is orange, and the ants, already scared by the doomsday ant’s worry
about a lurking, ant-eating aardvark, are now informed that “aardvarks turn
orange when they’re hungry for ants,” frightening everyone even more. The ants,
wearing little hard hats, continue drilling holes, as the imagined terrors
outside get stranger and stranger: the color blue must mean the orange aardvark
is wearing blue pajamas and getting ready to snack on ants before bedtime; red must
mean the orange aardvark in blue pajamas is carrying a bottle of ketchup to put
on ants; and so on. The notions get more and more extreme, the illustrations
more and more elaborate and funnier and funnier, until eventually a non-doomsday-predictor figures out what the
colors could indicate other than the
enormously elaborate and strange aardvark scenario. And sure enough, everything
turns out just fine – or does it? Hall’s final page buttons everything up
beautifully while leaving the eventual outcome of the whole story undecided – a
wonderfully amusing conclusion.
Things are silly and funny
in a different way in the grumpiness-banishing Hooray for Hat! Brian Won here offers a simple story in which lots
of grumpy animals – Elephant, Zebra, Turtle and others – have their bad moods
miraculously banished after Elephant receives an unexpected present: a box
containing a very elaborate hat that can be broken up into a lot of
less-elaborate hats, all of them smile-inducing. The animals march along,
spreading joy and cheer and hats wherever they go, until eventually they come
upon Lion, whose grumpiness is not so easily cured because it involves worry
about Giraffe, who is not feeling well. Obviously more hat magic is called for,
and that is just what all the animals provide, as “hooray for hats” turns into
“hooray for friends” at the book’s end. This simple, joyous and rather raucous
celebration of friendship and hatship is fun from start to finish.
Counting can be fun, too –
and, yes, unusual, as it is in Count on
the Subway. This is a New York City story, which will be enjoyed most by
residents of the city or ones familiar with its subway system, where the action
takes place and where the illustrations are grounded (or undergrounded). A
little girl and her mother, with one MetroCard for subway fare, go down two
flights of steps to catch the “3” train, which they approach through “4”
turnstiles while listening to “5” subway singers, and so on. The whole subway
ride is an adventure in music, which people play in stations and trains alike,
and in numbers, which describe seats, stops, riders, signs, train numbers and
more. Eventually the girl and her mother arrive at their destination, which
turns out to be Grand Central Station, and are last seen walking hand-in-hand
on the street. Simply written by Paul Dubois Jacobs and Jennifer Swender and
winningly illustrated by Dan Yaccarino, Count
on the Subway is a highly enjoyable trip up and down the first 10 numbers
for anyone who knows the Big Apple’s underground system either as a resident or
as a visitor.
No knowledge of any
particular place is needed for another transit-related counting book, Byron
Barton’s My Bus. More straightforward
than the subway story, this one involves dogs and cats boarding a bus driven by
a man named Joe – and then getting off for further travel on a boat, aboard a
train and on an airplane. That is, all get off except one dog, which comes home
with Joe: “My dog!” The count-up and count-down story here is very simple, and
the illustrations are so childlike that kids will imagine they could draw them
on their own. The result is a particularly pleasant little counting book for
young children, one quite easy for them to read on their own, allowing them
both to follow the words and to learn the numbers in an imaginative, amusing
and entirely age-appropriate way.
No comments:
Post a Comment