Who's Hiding? and Baby Dinosaurs Featured in Betsy Bird's 31 Days, 31 Lists

Clever little high-contrast board books, these. And part of what I like so much about them is the fact that they knew to do the blue color for “Whose Eyes?” and the red color for “Whose Nose?” You might see the potential problems had those been switched. Now these aren’t straight high-contrast titles in the sense that yes, there is black and there is white, but the lines aren’t simple. Indeed, Jones has worked a lot of delicate details into the landscapes surrounding each animal. A multitude of patterns make up the leaves or grass or even the insides of an animal’s delicate ear. As a result, it’s an artsier black-and-white-plus-one-color series of titles. They’re the kinds of books that you can hand to a parent and feel good about giving them away because they’re legitimately beautiful titles while ALSO knowing that the parents will like them for their artistic flourishes. Cool stuff. Extra points if you sing their titles to the tune of “These Eyes” by The Guess Who.

The series that, by all rights, should be the usual pablum continues to wow. I’ve been fond of this Baby Dinosaurs series from the get-go, impressed from day one by its adept rhymes and remarkable ability to pack a rather large amount of plot into a scant 20 pages. We do not usually associate peril with board books. But this is dinosaurs we’re talking about. Baby dinos, undoubtedly, had to deal with the possibility of getting eaten. And that’s not even taking into account the danger of updrafts (as with Baby Pterosaur) or grabby root systems (Baby Spinosaurus’s issue). The rhymes in these board books never let the reader down. I imagine that if you got the whole set of these books you’d probably be able to have the most mind-bogglingly exciting reading session with some lucky preschoolers imaginable. Warning: May turn small children into dinosaur fans. But what are the odds of that happening?