THE FARMER

Learn about farm animals and the farmer’s work in this lift-the-flap board book from Belgium and the Netherlands.

This toddler-friendly tale is part picture identification and part prediction. Each double-page spread shows four simply drawn animals or items on the left while the right side poses a question beneath a picture and invites readers to lift the flap on which both are printed. This setup clearly displays the featured items, and the questions invite little readers to practice making predictions about what will happen next. Sometimes there is an obvious answer to the question, as in which animal gets which type of food; other times, the question elicits a yes or no answer. In this way, Slegers keeps the experience of each page predictable without being repetitive. Some questions are confusing: Yes, the farmer appears to be watering the cauliflower, lettuce, and carrots he’s walking past with a watering can, but the answer is he’s not—“he’s watering the tomatoes in the greenhouse.” Others fail to purposefully include all the items depicted on verso, so that something like the pitchfork becomes simply unused background. The illustrations have thick, black outlines, with simple, bold colors and features. There isn’t much detail save the realistic texture of the farmer’s work clothes and the close-up photographed image of straw used in place of drawing on the bales of hay. The farmer presents White and is explicitly gendered male, and there are no other humans in the book.

Reader engagement saves this from complete unoriginality.