TO FLY

An extremely brief text describes the comical adventures of baby birds learning to fly, while several fold-out pages dramatize the action. “Peck peck pop” is the text for the first spread, showing the babies’ exaggerated pointy orange beaks and matching feet emerging from three white eggs in the grass. “Walk walk” is the second; a glowering parent leads them off. One of them hides, instigating readers to lift up the page, which extends full-size, doubling the book’s vertical size. The brief, rhyming text is enjoyable to recite aloud and will be easy for toddlers to memorize. The denouement shows all the birds flying into the sky with an enormous golden sun in the background, in a spread that folds out to twice the size of the others. Repeated folding will put a strain on this book in an institutional setting, but the humor of the birds’ expressions and the bold and stylized art easily recommend this for the board-book set. (Picture book. 2-5)