A Piece of Cake by LeUyen Pham (review)

It’s Little Bird’s birthday, and Mouse has baked her a cake. En route to deliver the tasty treat, he runs into an assortment of friends, each of whom offer items in trade for a slice, until Mouse arrives on Little Bird’s doorstep without any cake at all. Wise Little Bird, however, knows the traded items—a cork, a wire, a net, and a flyswatter—will be useful, and in fact the pair trades the items back to the same series of friends for the necessary ingredients to make a brand-new birthday cake. Pham’s tale engages in delightful absurdity, with creativity and subverted expectations in the animal’s barters (when the Bear complains, “These bees won’t leave me alone! If only I had something to swat them away,” Mouse and Little Bird bypass the flyswatter and instead suggest a cork “to close up the hole of the hive”). The narrative alternates between blocks of text and speech bubbles, and the many characters make the story well suited for a readers theater adaptation as well as a readaloud. Pham’s digitally colored pencil illustrations are retro flavored in style and layout; Mouse and Little Bird, in particular, with their pupils nearly as large as their eyeballs, are reminiscent of 1950s illustrative work, while the palette and gently curved spot art will be familiar to Golden Book fans. This will work remarkably well in a storytime setting, and there are plenty of opportunities for curricular tie-ins (particularly prediction and inference) for a school setting.