While text never directs the art to depict diverse individuals and family constellations, Gomez does just this in her illustrations. One family.” Gomez’s richly colored pictures clarify and expand on all that the text lists: For “six,” a picture showing six members of a multigenerational family of color includes a line of laundry with six items hanging from it outside of their windows, as well as the painting of a six-legged butterfly that a child in the family is creating. Shannon’s text is delivered in spare, rhythmic, lilting verse that begins with one and counts up to 10 as it presents different groupings of things and people in individual families, always emphasizing the unitary nature of each combination. Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.Ī playful counting book also acts as a celebration of family and human diversity. 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. A 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.

To the Beach by Linda Ashman