Open Very Carefully: A Book with Bite
A bucolic retelling of “The Ugly Duckling” gets derailed when the book is invaded by a hungry crocodile. “What’s he doing in this book?” asks the red-capped ugly duckling. From there, things get meta. The crocodile begins gobbling up certain letters, leaving the duckling to shout, “St p! Mr. Cr c dile!” After the croc begins snarfing up entire sentences, the duckling implores the reader to rock the book from side to side—good, now the crocodile is asleep. But after the duckling draws a tutu on the crocodile with a crayon, the green interloper tries to run away, only to smash up against the side of the page. Is there any other way out? Yes—and it’ll take a little audience participation to bring it about. This most recent entry in the self-relexive picture-book canon finds a comfortable niche between the brain-busting of Mordicai Gerstein’s A Book (2009) and the cute literary investigation of Mo Willems’ We Are in a Book! (2010). A clever way to get kids thinking about the infinite possibilities of stories. Preschool-Grade 1. --Daniel Kraus