MAILING MAY
By Michael O. Tunnell, illustrated by Ted Rand, Greenwillow (ages 4-7), $16
In 1914 in Idaho, going to visit your grandma who lives on the other side of the mountains is no small feat. Ma and Pa have promised May that she can go for a visit, but there’s no money for the train ticket. The solution: May is mailed, labeled as a “baby chick,” and rides in the mail car with her cousin, a railway postal clerk. Fifty-three cents is the tab. The story, based on an actual incident, is so unusual that it takes Ted Rand’s pictures to give it a more universal applicability, combining paintings of 1914 photographs with carefully detailed interiors of May’s house, the general store, the railway station and the mail car. May standing on the gigantic postal scale, being weighed in as a baby chick, is my favorite. Throughout, May’s eagerness to see her Grandma Mary beams out of her in every picture.
COUNTING CROCODILES
By Judy Siera, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand, Harcourt Brace (ages 3-7), $15
Any writer who can merrily rhyme “vicious” with “fishes” can tell a rousing counting tale, set in the middle of the Sillabobble Sea. A clever little monkey, living on a desert isle with only lemons to eat, spies an island with bananas not far away. The obstacles: the sea and the crocodiles therein. Very much in the tradition of clever animals in Kipling’s “Just So” stories, the monkey gets all the crocs to make a bridge for her. Counting is her strategy, and pride in numbers their downfall. She counts crocs in polka-dot socks, crocs with pink Mohawks, but she gets her bananas in the end. (And plants a banana tree on her own island. A clear planner-ahead sort of monkey.) The counting pictures are filled with a number of quiet jokes about the crocodiles, so there’s fun even if you already know your numbers.
LITTLE BABY BOBBY
By Nancy Van Laan, illustrated by Laura Cornell, Knopf (ages 3-6), $17
“Little baby Bobby
lives on a hill.
Oopsa! Oopsa!
He never sits still.”
After that introductory verse, the rest of the book hurtles along at the same pace, as Bobby’s buggy starts rolling downhill past a slew of people and objects. The racing words are a premier opportunity for any adult reader with a tendency toward dramatic ham. Cornell’s pictures contrast the growing glee of Bobby and the chaos he’s causing as he cuts a bouncy swathe through the neighborhood. Good fun.
