HAIR

A board book for toddlers who are almost ready for their first haircuts.

Patricelli’s familiar, light-skinned, oval-headed baby, outlined in black with rosy smudges for cheeks, manages to express a full range of emotion—from pride to fear to worry to surprise and back to pride, all while explaining the importance of hair care. Though this baby has just one curly strand of hair (“I have a hair!”), it still needs to be washed, brushed, and decorated, until it grows so long that it must be cut. Adults may chuckle at the baby’s rejection of the dog groomer for that first haircut, but much of the humor will go right over the heads of toddlers. A final double-page spread illustrates “more kinds of hair” with very unbabyish vocabulary—“unibrow,” “Mohawk”—mixed in among words such as “beard,” and “curly.” The baby’s reasonable question, “Will it hurt?” gives voice to the concerns of toddlers heading to the barber for the first time, and the turn of the page assures them, “It did not hurt!” Nighty-Night (published simultaneously) will have more long-term use. That same one-haired baby rhymes its way through a bedtime-avoidance routine complete with a subtle homage to Goodnight Moon and an exuberant “naked dance.”

With its companion, another solid outing for Patricelli’s tot