Whose Shoe? By Eve Bunting.
Illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier. Clarion. $16.99.
The LOUD Book! By Deborah
Underwood. Illustrated by Renata Liwska. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.
Brief, neatly rhymed and
thoroughly engaging, Eve Bunting’s Whose
Shoe? is the simple story of a helpful mouse who finds a single shoe and
decides to locate the animal that lost it: “Finders keepers? That’s not true./
I’ll find the owner of this shoe.” This mouse lives in a place, winningly and
wittily illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier, where tigers ride scooters and myna
birds keep shelves of books, and where all the animals wear shoes – most
amusingly, Spider, who wears eight whose size makes them difficult to locate
and therefore important to lace tight: “If I lost one, I’d be upset—/ spider
shoes are hard to get.” Mouse proceeds on his quest, unable to find the shoe’s
owner but garnering plenty of praise from the other animals for trying to do
the right thing, as when Hippo says, “I want to thank you for inquiring./ Your
honesty is quite inspiring.” Hippo’s choice of footwear is designed to prevent
him from getting mud between his toes; Elephant prefers high heels, but the
shoe found by Mouse is a flat – every animal turns down the shoe, but
determined Mouse marches on with it. And of course, eventually he finds its
owner – who explains how the shoe ended up in “the tall bamboo” and turns out
not to want to keep it. The result: the shoe becomes a gift for Mouse, and
although it is much too big for him, he figures out just what to do with it to
put it to good use and bring this genuinely adorable book to an apt and amusing
conclusion.
There are animals aplenty in
The LOUD Book! as well. And there is
a heaping helping of charm in the new padded-board-book version of Deborah
Underwood’s 2011 companion to The Quiet
Book. The various kinds of loudness are situational, and that is what makes
the book so clever: Renata Liwska does a wonderful job showing just why
“applause loud” is different from “thunderstorm loud,” and both are different
from “candy wrapper loud” in a movie theater. Some forms of “loud” are
connected: “oops loud” shows the hole in a window after a ball is hit through
it, and then “unexpected entrance loud” shows the excitement when the same ball
flies into the middle of a play being performed on stage, inside the building
whose window was just broken. Other forms of “loud” are simply silly: “spilling
your marbles in the library loud.” And some require a bit of thinking:
“deafening silence loud” shows a clearly irritated mother rabbit looking down
at the two children who are taking cookies out of the jar they have knocked off
a shelf. The bunnies, bears and other animals in The LOUD Book! do not speak, but their expressions say a great deal
about what each type of “loud” is and how they are participating in or reacting
to it. “Ants loud,” for instance, shows the insects crawling over apples in a
picnic basket that a clearly distraught little rabbit has just opened – it is
her crying, even though not made explicit in words or sounds, that is loud. A
treat for pre-readers and young readers to discover or for families to
rediscover in a new format, The LOUD
Book! promises plenty of quiet enjoyment – unless, of course, kids decide
to fill in some of the sounds so artfully communicated through its silent scenes.
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