Me and My Animal Friends
PreSchool-Grade 1—This contagiously playful collaboration is filled with sly textual and visual jokes. Songwriter Covert's photo takes center stage on the title page and persists in a hide-and-seek game on the spreads that follow. His face peeks out of a springy kangaroo's pouch, stares between bat wings, flits by in a dragonfly, and reposes in a frog's pouchy cheeks. Keller's impish acrylic and collage illustrations are filled with swirls, sweeps, and explosions of color and shape; their almost musical quality reinforces the song: "Blue fish, red fish,/galloping goats,/puffins and camels/and piranhas in moats." But the song is not just a happy list of animals; it's a wild, whimsical wheedle aimed at two doubting but indulgent parents: "And I wish, I really wish,/I really, really wish/they could be my pets./Oh, please, pretty please,/from the bottom/of my heart/to the top of my head." Readers who don't know Covert's music are at a slight disadvantage: it would be far easier to "hear" the lyrics if the melody were already planted in one's brain. While the words are repeated, along with guitar chords, at book's end, sheet music is not included. Though the abundance of bounciness occasionally makes it hard to follow the text on the page, all is forgiven: in this book, it's the bounce that counts.—Susan Weitz, formerly at Spencer-Van Etten School District, Spencer, NYEND