- Little Bee
Everybody's on the move in this rhyming board book, and they've all got good reason: the little bee's on the wing because a hungry frog's after him, the frog's actually jumping away from a snake, the snake's slithering away from a mongoose, and so on up to the "big hunter"—who's running because the little bee is flying after him. Audiences will immediately catch on to the pattern in the sprightly, simple Q&A couplets ("Little bee, little bee, why do you flee?/ Because there's a hungry frog chasing me!"), and the punchline has genuine, amusing, and audience-suitable punch. The full-bleed spreads employ a politely modest backdrop of stylized and color-coordinated foliage to support the starring animals, who are bursting with vivid saturated colors in frescoesque layers and sharply outlined with squiggly, snarly, splotchy line. The figures are comic enough to take the tension out of the pursuit, but they're still high-impact and expressive presences who seem as ready to jump off of the page as jump into the next spread. Page turns offer opportunities for a "guess the answer" reveal of each critter's pursuer, and the movement across the spreads (the lion, for instance, appears first entering the spread on the left, then he's in full glory in the middle, and then his tail hangs behind as the rest of him has moved off the scene) is carefully sequenced for maximum impact. This would be an excellent pairing with Rosen's Tiny Little Fly (BCCB 12/10) for an early duo of insect capers; be sure to let youngsters have a feel of the sparkly real-cloth wings on the cover.