Last week I brought home Holly’s Red Boots by Francesca Chessa, to field test it as a potential process art storytime title.  It makes for a good read aloud, and the girls have enjoyed it.  I’ll borrow Geraldine’s description (from the unprompted book-reportish note I found on the table):

Holly wants to play outside but her mom says she must waer [sic] her red boots.  The end.

I’ll elaborate that the crux of the book is Holly’s search for the boots, instead finding all sorts of other red objects.  Great for younger kids.

We also read David Lucas’s Peanut several times this week.  The story is about a peanut-sized monkey (with, as you can see from the cover, a body-tail size ratio of approximately 1:4) who grew inside a flower.  No shortage of absurdity there.  He ends up being afraid of everything, and it takes a friendly beetle, whom he initially suspects is a ghost, to tell him otherwise.  The illustrations are great; we especially loved the depictions of various bugs.  The story seemed to have some major plot issues to me—for example, just-born Peanut doesn’t know enough about his environment to understand wind or rain, but he has concepts of monsters and ghosts?—but the girls didn’t mind.

The illustrations are solid enough to carry the story in its week spots.  Even on the last page, when Peanut tells Beetle, “Come on!” apropos of nothing.  Beetle replies with, “Do let’s be careful!”  I have no idea how we landed on that moral, but it’s surrounded by a lively illustration of a tree that has the following on its branches:  an aardvark, an owl and bat (who are awake), a snake, an anteater, a pineapple, a bunch of grapes, and is that a butternut squash?  It’s pretty entertaining.  Omit the last for lines of text, and you’d have a perfect spread.

Find out what the other kids are reading this week at The Well-Read Child.