Sonderbooks Book Review of

by Alison Murray

Simplicity. This book has it, in a beautiful form.

I recently had the joy of being promoted to Youth Services Manager at my library branch, so I get to do children's programs again! Tomorrow, I'm doing a Mother Goose Time for babies from birth to eighteen months. In Mother Goose Time, we mainly do rhymes and songs in the parent's lap. But I like to work in three books that are short and simple and that the parents can read along with me.

One Two That's My Shoe! is perfect. The text is reminiscent of the old rhyme "One Two Buckle My Shoe," going from one to ten with a rhyme after every second number. However, this book puts a story to the rhymes. With One Two, a dog has taken a little girl's shoe, and is running away with it.

With each number, the pictures show that many objects that the dog is running past -- toys, butterflies, flowers, trees, chicks and hens. The ten hens add a little inside joke. You'd expect Nine, Ten to rhyme with "Big Fat Hen" as in "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe," but instead the girl shoos them away, recovers her shoe, and hugs the dog with the words "Friends again!"

This book is simple. The illustrations are done with printmaking, and look old-fashioned and classic. With at most three words on a page, you can read it quickly for the little one with a short attention span, but there's plenty to talk about. Will the dog get away with the shoe? What will stop him?

As a counting book, it's also excellent. All the objects passed are easily counted, with none tricky to find, but covering a wide scope of objects, and variety within the objects. The objects are not identical, but it's easy to see that they belong together. Each number is both written out in the text and represented by a numeral in a corner. Next to the numeral, there are silhouettes of the object counted in the picture, so it's nice and clear.

This is simply a lovely first counting book, and one that parents and children won't get tired of any time soon. I'm happy to show it off at Mother Goose Time tomorrow.