Written by DJ Corchin; Illustrated by Dan Dougherty
After getting past the regular graphic illustrations of the cover and following pages, I was pleasantly surprised upon reading this picture book. What really took me in and made me want to write a blog entry was the pacing of and the importance of the storyline. A boy says hello to a fish, lion, and bee and when they don’t respond to him and ignore him, he considers them to be awfully rude. It takes a tree to explain to the boy that he is not the center of the universe, even though he thinks he deserves to be and that other world beings including the fish, lion or bee are not obligated to speak and understand Kid talk. The boy is pleasantly surprised when Tree offers to teach him Fish. So upon his return walk he can converse with the fish and it sounds like, “ Blurp, Blip, Blurp Blurp.” These back and forth conversations with the animals are adorable and young children will enjoy them. They’ll like that in the conversation with Lion, the boy makes a silly speaking error which makes Lion fall down laughing and makes the boy embarrassed. As the subtitle says, “[This is] a story about communicating and understanding” and I think Upper Preschool through Grade Two teachers should share this one with their classrooms. Without being preachy, a moral lesson of how we should live in this world is shared: “They always worked to understand each other…and their world got a whole lot bigger.” Thankfully, by the end of the book the colors and graphics worked so much better and melded nicely with the story line.