LITTLE OLD FARM FOLK

A cozy board book is as traditional as “traditional” can be.

“On a little old farm… // In a little old house… // A little old lady flips two eggs from a pan, / as the toast pops up for her little old man.” The book goes on to enumerate the various farm activities this gray-haired white couple engages in. The little old man tends livestock and crops, while the little old lady works in her kitchen garden and cooks; throughout, a brown corgi and a tiger cat supervise. Wisnewski’s rhythmic verse rolls along with pleasing inevitability, the final line of each page of text (always on verso) ending with a turn-prompting ellipsis that takes readers to the next bucolic scene. These are presented in round medallions that take up the whole of each 6-inch-square recto, with complementary accents (pairs of red socks with the laundry scene, sprigs of blueberries with the pie-baking scene) in each corner. Although this farm is not free of relatively modern technology, those few items that do exist (an old enameled gas stove, a mid-20th-century red tractor) reinforce the sense of time gone by. The book ends with the four principals “fast asleep,” the corgi tucked in between little old man and little old lady and the cat curled up on the covers.

An idyllic and idealized portrait of rural America, preserved in ink and paint rather than amber