BABY'S FIRST WORDS

A little girl explores her surroundings in this board book.

Each turn of the page offers a different scene with objects labeled in bold, black text. The brown-haired, peach-skinned toddler spends time with her interracial dads (one’s black, and the other has olive skin and black hair) playing in the park, eating lunch, taking a bath, and eventually going to bed. Each double-page spread focuses on one setting, activity, or theme, as in one of various types of locomotion, another set in a kitchen at lunchtime, and another that focuses on emotions. Labels are printed in boldface type, sometimes with an extra descriptor: “loud fire engine”; “excited wiggle.” A Spanish-language version of the book, Mis Primeras Palabras, is concurrently published, with identical illustrations but swapping Spanish descriptors in for English ones. The illustrations employ a dark color palette that leans heavily on purples, greens, oranges, and browns to render the chunky and curved objects. The compositions are a little cluttered, with each scene depicting about 10 new words. Little ones will learn about clothes, food, emotions, animals, and more in this fairly extensive but still compact resource.

A solid, attractive vocabulary builder.