Is it a stormy-night scare or a bedtime book? Both! Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change.

A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!” his lamb baas back.

3-6)Ī succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.Ī grumpy bull says, “DADA!” his calf moos back. A winner for a winter storytime, this is as amusing as watching real kittens romp. Preschoolers will, no doubt, choose their own names for them. Not naming the kittens is a clever and shrewd stroke, enabling the artwork to imbue each cat with personality by its color, feline antics and expressions. As the fourth kitten laughs, jumps and rolls in it, the other three look at each other and say, “We’ll be right out!” Grinning and licking snowflakes, the fourth kitten replies, “I can’t wait.” The spare text is charmingly illustrated with simple black-lined kittens, minimally delineated scenes and white bordered spreads that frame the colorful felines. Then one winter morning they awaken to snow. The first kitten says, “Snow scares me!” The second kitten says, “Freezing cold!” The third kitten says, “Cold to the tips of our tails!” But the fourth kitten says, “I can’t wait!” All through summer and autumn, the three kittens worry and the fourth one can’t wait. Once there were four kittens who had never seen snow.

A Kitten Tale by Eric Rohmann