Reviews: Fly with the Birds: a Word and Rhyme book

This review was first appeared in Publishers Weekly, March 25, 1996 v243 n13 p82(1).

   Edwards (The Forest Child) and Kitamura (When Sheep Cannot Sleep) follow a child through an ordinary day in this well-organized, imaginatively designed vocabulary-builder. Each spread includes a triptych of the blond narrator's daily activities, a poem and a gatefold flap that lifts to reveal the poem's final line. On the flap appears a group of words and pictures that can be matched to the illustrations. When the child imagines escaping a traffic jam, for instance[...]

("Stuck in the traffic, we creep and we crawl, /Buses and cars hardly moving at all,/ So closing my eyes, I say two magic words.../ Hey, presto! A bus that can fly with the birds!"),

the vocabulary list sends readers on a search for a bicycle, van and trailer; the first picture shows passengers sitting miserably on a stalled bus, but the concealed picture is of a bus hoisted into the air by a flock of birds.

   Edwards's 11 rhymes about pets, shopping and the weather prove serviceable at best. However, Kitamura's angular illustrations, drawn with a steady pen and filled with compatible solid colors, nicely serve the word-game setup.

   Despite the complex arrangement of images, text and gatefolds, the overall effect is invitingly clean.

Review Grade: A

This review was first appeared in The Independent, Aug 19, 1995.

   A book of rhymes which take children from everyday things like pets and traffic jams to a world of dinosaurs, flying buses and trips to the moon. Flaps keep potentially book-hating children involved while a selection of "over 100 carefully chosen words to support reading attempts" will keep hot-housing parents happy. Solid and sensible with a just a hint of welcome silliness from Kitamura's quirky illustrations of skating cats and astronautical dogs.

By Sally Williams.