Where’s Walrus? And Penguin? by Stephen Savage
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is the follow-up book to Where’s Walrus? and it has the same general shape—in a no-text picture book, animals escape from the zoo and blend into the city amongst humans in unexpectedly well-camouflaged ways while an increasingly frantic zookeeper (and the giggling reader) tries to find them.
in the first book, the escapee was a lone walrus but here he contributes to the delinquency of a penguin and the pair have an extremely productive day that culminates in an unexpected event. View Spoiler »
the artwork is really cute, and it feels like it falls on the younger side of the picture book age range, even down to the safety scissors-rounded edges of the illustrations.
it’s sort of a pre-where’s waldo book—the pages aren’t cluttered enough to be challenging, but it’s a fun way to train little eyes to look for the unexpected in picture books.
overall, it’s one of those picture books i liked, but it doesn’t have that hard-to-define quality that’s gonna make it live in my heart forever. which is fine—my heart’s pretty crowded already. i was only medium on the first book, but when i saw this one at BEA i thought, “maybe it just needed a penguin to push it over the hump and into my heart.” but nope! it’s cute and i’m sure little kids’ll love it to pieces, but i can only like, i cannot love.
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