DO JELLYFISH LIKE PEANUT BUTTER?

Playful questions and factual answers introduce 12 sea creatures.

Following up on Do Doodlebugs Doodle? (2018), their investigation of insects, this mother-and-daughter authorial pair again team up with illustrator Shi, this time to speculate about sea dwellers. Posing questions, including the one in the title, they ask about pilot whales, sea lions, trumpet fish, sea horses, lampreys, clown fish, football fish, skates, hammerhead sharks, starfish, and mussels. Each question is illustrated on a page or spread; a page turn reveals the answer, usually a resounding “No!” The jokes are clever: Lamprey eels aren’t “plugged in,” but they do connect by “attaching their mouths to a fish’s body,” and so forth. Except for the opening and closing spreads, the layout also reveals the difference between the jokey question, set above a rectangle with rounded corners that contains a painted interpretation, and the serious answer, set on a full-bleed image. The creatures are often anthropomorphized as part of the visual joke and shown more naturally on the page with the facts. Some images include human children; a pale-skinned child with brown hair in a double bun and a different brown-haired child with darker skin appear more than once. Noting that their examples include mammals, fish, and invertebrates, the authors provide a paragraph of further information about each of these animals in the backmatter (where they clarify that starfish are more properly called sea stars).

Wordplay that is entertaining and mildly educational.