Let’s Play! by Hervé Tullet (review)

If the interactive color romp Mix It Up! (BCCB 11/14) was fun, Tullet’s latest title is (with apology for mangled grammar) even funner. A bored yellow dot perched on a spidery black line invites kids to “press the top corner to get me started.” This magical touch is enough to launch the dot to the top right corner of the next spread, as evidenced by the page turn. A couple more touches, and the dot is all warmed up (“Feels good to be getting a bit of exercise!”) and ready to roll. As the audience traces the black line with a finger, yellow dot joyously twists, turns, multiplies, and changes colors. Expect some change-ups, though: there’s a brief adventure past comic-creepy eyeballs in a darkened tunnel (“We better leave on tiptoe,” dot says as it makes its way over a dotted line), and a surreal mind-bender in a field of black ink splotches (“I really don’t like this page”). Getting dot over a big red bump takes several tries, and a stoplight slows things down for a few seconds, but it’s all in the service of masterful pacing. This is silliness at its most effective, and the innate drollery of playing with a two-dimensional dot will provide adult readers with almost as much entertainment as the little tyke audience. Expect the library copy to be perpetually smudged with fingerprints. And that’s a good thing.