Baby room

BABY BOO!

(Templar, 4.99) I love the combination of black and white photographs of expressive babies alongside colourful graphics. The rhythmic text has a perfect pace and the only page without a photo of a baby, featuring the text 'Baby, baby, where are you?' is followed by a vivid green page with 'boo!' The last page features a shiny mirror for children to look in, and the reflection is impressively high. It's an attractive book with vivacity woven through the carefully constructed content.

HAPPY DOG SAD DOG. by Sam Lloyd. (Little Tiger Press, 3.99).

The mere 29 words in this book (I counted) do not limit its value. On the contrary, this compact book is all the more impressive for its range of ideas and its humour. Opposites can be a hard concept to convey, especially in a contemporary style, but Sam Lloyd successfully animates the big shapes to communicate beautifully the differences between dogs. There's a clean dog and a dirty dog. They're both smiling, but one of them has flies buzzing around it - guess which. The hot dog is sweating in an appealing way, and the cold dog's uneven teeth and wobbly legs show how shivery he is. The ending has a perfect opposites theme.