I BOUGHT A BABY CHICKEN

A moderately silly counting book, with slick, cartoony, computer-influenced illustrations opposite each page of short rhymed

text. A girl in overalls buys a chick at the General Store, the kind of shop with ribbons and paint, a barrel of pickles and hams hung from the ceiling. Her older sister, charmed by the black chicks, buys two more, and her father, taken by the striped ones, buys three, and so on through her family, until over 50 baby chickens come home to roost. "There were chickens in the kitchen . . . / . . . There were chickens in my bed!" The pigtailed heroine who started it all ends by noting, puckishly, "I guess my

family’s lucky / that I didn’t want a cow!" (Picture book. 3-6)