SO MANY BABIES

A board-book introduction to animal babies, at least pictorially.

Each page introduces a new animal and its habitat, sometimes giving hints to animal behavior, but it introduces more questions than it answers. The animals look more like cartoons that the real thing, a potential point of confusion. For instance, the elephant that accompanies the text “Babies in jungles” is pale green. Sometimes it is unclear which animal is featured—does “Babies in rivers” refer to the big-eyed beavers clinging to logs or to the school of fish they are eyeing? Worse, “babies in bogs” presents three smiling frogs and a few tadpoles, with no indication that the tadpoles are the babies. The species are not named, so adult readers are left guessing—is that a pile of bears in a cave or some more exotic creature? Readers may not be able to name the ring-tailed lemur or know that sea otters float on their backs, particularly when the drawing of the sea otter gives so few accurate clues. Rhyming text is choppy and forced. After all the cutesy animals, the final page changes the subject from animal babies to a saccharine assurance that “baby, my baby, there's no one like you!”

So Many Babies are a few too many.