THE LITTLEST DINOSAUR

In this bland tale, a hatchling dinosaur barely bigger than one of his several siblings’ feet gets a chance to shine when his entire family becomes mired in sticky mud. Timidly setting out on his own, he appeals for help to a humongous and clumsy “Long Neck,” who galumphs to the rescue. The Littlest Dinosaur earns the praise of his erstwhile dismissive father, after which he and the now more self-confident Long Neck become the “greatest of friends.” Ably underscoring their immense size differential, Foreman casts Littlest as a puny triceratops walking on two legs (his sibs walk on four, except when they’re playing soccer), and colors the Long Neck a deep blue that makes him seem all the more massive. Still, next to the undersized but intrepid protagonists in Jean Willis’s Cottonball Colin (2008), and Kevin Sherry’s I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean! (2007), Littlest isn’t going to make much of an impression. Nor will the routine plot or language. (Picture book. 6-8)