Otter Loves Easter! By Sam
Garton. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $9.99.
Dill & Bizzy: Opposite Day.
By Nora Ericson. Illustrated by Lisa Ericson. Harper. $17.99.
Bizarre Birds. By Sandra
Horning. Scholastic. $3.99.
Sam Garton’s charmingly
naïve character, Otter, who showed her love of Halloween in an earlier book,
now proves just as loving and just as confused where Easter is concerned. This
is strictly a child’s version of a secular Easter, where the love is of
baskets, eggs, rabbits, chocolate, jelly beans and such. Otter’s Easter haul,
displayed across two pages in Garton’s always appropriate illustrations,
includes small, medium and large chocolate eggs, additional eggs in a basket, a
bag of jelly beans, a gold-wrapped chocolate bunny, and a pair of bunny ears.
The fun of all the Otter books lies in how the endearingly anthropomorphic
title character interacts with her friends, all of them stuffed animals,
treating them as if they are alive. That is indeed what happens in Otter Loves Easter! But here Otter’s
behavior leads to a clear lesson learned about selfishness and sharing. Otter Keeper
(the human with whom Otter lives) says Otter must share the candy with her
friends, but Otter explains, “I couldn’t share my eggs. They were mine!” Otter tries to give up some
candy, really she does, but “sharing is very hard” and “eating chocolate is
very easy.” So soon enough, Otter, who is always plump, is looking even plumper
as she gorges herself on chocolate and is too full for breakfast and feels “a
little sick.” After a nap, Otter realizes that she really should have shared
with her friends, so she determines to “save Easter,” dons the bunny ears she
received, and becomes “the Easter Otter!” The result is a wonderful Easter egg
hunt in which, of course, Otter’s stuffed friends cannot really hunt for
anything. But Otter makes sure that Pig, Teddy and Giraffe all “find” eggs, and
even Otter Keeper gets one, and of course everything ends happily as the
stuffed animals “share” their eggs with her – since, after all, they cannot
really eat them. Otter’s misadventures always end pleasantly, and the “learn to
share” lesson here is delivered amusingly enough so young readers may actually
pay attention, even when chocolate is at stake.
The lesson of Dill & Bizzy: Opposite Day is that
sometimes friends can like things that are, well, opposites. This is the second
book by sisters Nora and Lisa Ericson to feature Dill, “an odd duck,” and
Bizzy, “a strange bird” who seems, based on his distinctively odd appearance,
to have escaped from a zoo run by Dr. Seuss. In the first book, the two met and
became best friends; but in this one, the friendship is put under strain. What
happens is that the birds’ routine goes awry one morning when Bizzy wakes up
before Dill instead of afterwards. Bizzy, who is a bit of a ditz, decides that
must mean it is Opposite Day, and starts insisting that everything be done
backwards: morning dinner instead of breakfast, a fast morning run instead of
the birds’ usual slow wake-up waddle, and so on. Dill has soon had more than
enough of this and says he does not like Opposite Day and wants things quiet,
but Bizzy says that, since this is
Opposite Day, that must mean Dill loves Opposite Day and wants a loud dance
party. Dill simply cannot get through to
Bizzy, who insists on everything being the opposite of normal, to the point of the
birds brushing dust on their faces before bed instead of washing them. It is
only when Dill realizes that if it is truly Opposite Day, then the two birds
must be the opposite of best friends – that is, worst enemies – that Bizzy
agrees it cannot be Opposite Day anymore. So all ends happily, if with a rather
large helping of bemusement, until, inevitably, Bizzy wakes up the next morning
with his feet where his head usually is and vice versa, and declares it is
going to be Backwards Day. What happens next is left up to suitably delighted
young readers to figure out for themselves.
Dill and Bizzy are purely
fictional – especially Bizzy – but there are
some strange real-world birds out there. And in a new Scholastic Level 2 Reader
called Bizarre Birds, Sandra Horning
explains about and shows some of them. There is the hoatzin, which smells like
cow poop and has chicks born with claws on their wings; the ribbon-tailed bird
of paradise, some of which have tail feathers almost as long as a baseball bat;
the oxpecker, which lives on top of large grazing animals and eats their
parasites – and their earwax; the California condor, whose wings can be up to
10 feet wide; the common tailorbird, which makes a nest by gathering green
leaves, poking holes in them, and sewing them together with spider webs or thin
plant strips; and others. To keep the book easy to read, the type is large and
the amount of information small, but there is enough here – both in words and
in photographs – to intrigue budding naturalists and encourage them to seek out
more-in-depth information on wonders of the real world of animals in other
books. The Level 2 books are designed for developing readers in first and
second grade, but any child with an interest in unusual creatures will likely
enjoy this one, whose photos will attract younger children and whose text,
although simple, gives enough information to get older kids interested in
finding out more about the 14 birds shown here – and the many others, including
quite a few strange ones, that can be discovered in other books.
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