How Many Jelly Beans? (review)

This oversized picture book, perfect for classroom sharing, follows a simmering rivalry between a girl and boy over jelly beans. Emma takes ten, but when Aiden gets twenty without any adult argument, Emma naturally wants even more. And so it escalates: twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, one hundred, and beyond; far beyond, even to the thousands and finally a million. At each step, the requisite number of jelly beans is displayed (or presumably so—would you like to count them?), until the multicolored dots look more like a Seurat daydream than distinguishable candies. The children and their backgrounds are simply rendered in black ink with a single splotch of colored floor, the better to show off the bright confections. David Schwartz has notably broken ground for the exploration of large numbers in his perennially appealing How Much Is a Million? However, Menotti's outing culminates in a ten-section foldout so awesome and unwieldy that no reader will be able to hold it up single-handed. Is it really "one million jelly beans"? Take it on faith.