ANIMALS

A striking poster album of animals.

This oversized Swedish import is 18 inches tall, hard for a small child to manage but ideal for sharing with young children seated in a preschool circle or at library storytime so that everyone can see the pages. It has a simple format: 32 animals are portrayed in flat, colorful, stylized illustrations, one per page, each with its name (the book’s only text) in a typeface chosen cutely to match the animal’s style or character. Thus “zebra” incorporates stripes, “wolf” is set in scary Halloween-ish block type, “sheep” is white and curvy, and the rabbit’s ears are mirrored in the cursive double letter “b” of its name. Sometimes the single name is hard to read, being highly stylized or artfully broken into two lines. Elegant endpapers duplicate the illustrations in a pastel checkerboard array. The design and appearance are precious and lovely to look at. Children will find this initially engaging, but the content is too bare-bones to satisfy by itself; it’s more a series of stylized posters than a book.

This title will most likely be appreciated as an artifact in its own right or used as a talking point for discussion about these mostly familiar animals.