Lucky Hares and Itchy Bears - Softcover

Kindergarten-Grade 3. Fifteen animals common to Northern latitudes are featured in short poems and hand-colored, linoleum block print illustrations. The selections range from 8-12 lines and the style is lively and rather colloquial: "Froggy Boy, I have to ask ya,/Whatcha doin' in Alaska?" and not always grammatically correct: "And so you're quite content to doze/While all the world around is froze." The book is quite attractive; each double-page spread presents the text on a monochromatic background (the walrus with a design of ice floes and water, the octopus against a design of suckers) and includes a full-color picture of the animal in an inset. The bold typeface complements the illustrations, which are similar to Ashley Wolff's A Year of Birds (Puffin, 1988) and A Year of Beasts (Dutton, 1986). Some of the pieces are typeset as "concrete" poems, with the words arranged in a way that evokes what is being described. Collections about animals are very popular, and this book has some heavy competition: it is not as distinguished as Douglas Florian's Beast Feast (Harcourt, 1994); or Ted Hughes's Under the North Star (Viking, 1981; o.p.), which also features Northern animals and has stunning paintings by Leonard Baskin; and the humor isn't quite as zany as Dick King-Smith's Alphabeasts (Macmillan, 1992) or J. Patrick Lewis's A Hippopotamusn't (Dial, 1990).?Pam Gosner, formerly at Maplewood Memorial Library, NJ
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