Mamacentric Universe? Everything Is MAMA! by Jimmy Fallon

EVERYTHING IS MAMA, ACCORDING TO YOU.

BUT THERE ARE OTHER FUN WORDS YOU'LL WANT TO KNOW, TOO!

Which comes first? DA-DA? Or MA-MA?

Whichever is the first word, the Big Two stand alone as the initial achievement for Baby.

Still, there's a big wide, wonderful world of words out there just waiting to be voiced, and most word-loving moms can't wait to hear them from Baby's lips.

But some kids get stuck in a rut!

SUN! (says Mom Turtle).

MAMA! (says her son, dutifully wearing his sunglasses.)

But logophile mothers keep trying with a bunch of child-pleasing nouns. Come on, Kid! Read my lips! Say--Waffle? Hat? Boat? Ball? Balloon?

But little monkeys, ostriches, tigers, and penguins don't follow their leader. They all fall back on their favorite word! And we all know what that is, don't we? Well, one doesn't. Given the word, Boat, he comes back with Quack!

There's one in every crowd.

A mama giraffe with a very nice neck slurps a very long Noodle! Who could resist trying that nice oodly oodle word? Her baby, that's who. A mama zebra tries another juicy word--one with a plosive initial consonant and rhyming syllables--Pajamas! Back comes that favorite word.

Mother 'Gator blows Bubbles, Mother Owl hoots Moon, and Mother Sloth bestirs herself to juggle Apples, all to no avail. At least all the critter tots are consistent. (Well, not that duckling. He's gotta be the exception that proves the rule.)

Can't anybody say anything but Mama?

A companion book to late-night star Jimmy Fallon's best-selling, Your Baby's First Word Will Be DADA (see 2015 review here), his just-published Everything Is MAMA (Feiwel and Friends, 2017) gives mothers their due. It's probably true that the local version of "mama" is the most spoken word world wide, and Fallon's new picture book will have youngsters gleefully chiming in on that oft-repeated word on every double-page spread. Artist Miguel Ordonez takes up right where he left off in the first book with his soft, simple, and stylized animals in sight gags that even the littlest will find funny: a little turtle refuses to say "sun" but shows that he knows to don his sunglasses when he sees it, and a stubborn little duckling deadpans a quack right back in a species-specific response. It's all in good fun, because as all little ones know, for Mama. . .

EVERYTHING IS YOU!