HUNGRY FOR NUMBERS

Would someone please find this man a writer? As in his recent Humpty Dumpty (April 2006), the really long-term veteran Delessert wastes his art by pairing it with a vanishingly superficial plotline—here involving a cast of mouse-like, rabbit-like monsters juggling one banana, two apples, three oranges and so on, up to ten blueberries, then tossing them all together into a sort of aerial fruit salad. “What fun!” leadingly suggests the minimal text. Except for the pleasure of appreciating the supple lines and subtly modulated colors of Delessert’s figures on oversized double-page spreads, the natural response—particularly from readers of Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar or Denise Fleming’s Lunch—is likely to be: “Fun? Where?” (Picture book. 3-5)