TEN FRIENDS

An eyeful of lively characters gives this counting book plenty of vim, as do Goldstone’s (The Beastly Feast, 1998) choices of words. “If you could ask 10 friends to tea, tell me who your friends would be.” Then, sequentially, he adds two numbers together to make ten, then three numbers to make ten, then four, and so on, from a simple “If you ask 8 trusty tailors, they could come with 2 proud plumbers,” to the more brain-baking “How about 1 prince, 1 painter, and 2 otters, 1 diner, 1 miner, 1 major, and 3 otters.” There are scuba divers, chauffeurs, quilters, ballerinas, and ventriloquists, all mixing and matching. Cahoon’s (Word Play ABC, 1999) computer art turns the shepherds into geese, the chauffeurs into hippos, and the drummers into octopuses, adding another layer of humor. Busy pages compensate for flat color and figures, which somehow seem right. Goldstone’s rhyme is often spread over two pages, so it can be difficult to get the syncopation right, but the fun here is in the counting more than the verse. At the end, Goldstone and Cahoon gather all their characters together in a great tea party of 100, and on the last page, a note demonstrates all the ways to add up to ten using different sets of numbers. (Picture book. 3-6)