Duck--And Cover! Duck, Duck, Dinosaur: Snowy Surprise by Kellie George

It's winter!

Today the surprise is...    SNOW!

For Feather (a duck) and Flap (also a duck) and their brother--by another-mother--Spike (NOT a duck; more like a dinosaur actually), the first day of winter has brought them something they've never seen before.

It's white and it's slippery, and of course Spike LOVES it! (Spike loves everything.) It's cold and it's wet, and of course Feather and Flap hate it. Their little webbed feet are in danger of turning blue.

But Brother Spike is gonzo about snow!

Nothing will do but for Spike to urge his little feathered semi-siblings to join him in a frenzy of winter sports. Feather and Flap loyally shiver through rounds of snowball fights, shake through belly-flop sledding, and get goosebumps from ice skating on the frozen pond. If the ducklings had teeth, they would be chattering all through Spike's snowman-building challenge, too. Brrrrrrrr!

Feather and Flap are about to mount a hypothermia mutiny when they spot MAMA, bearing hot cocoa and what looks like a mountain of poofy, downy duck jackets, knitted caps with ear flaps, and woolly-lined snow boots made for chilly webbed feet. Suddenly the ducklings are all go-go for snow!

What a surprise!

Mama knows best when it comes to winter wear, in Kellie George's latest book in her quacky-quirky sort-of-sibling tales in her emergent reader series, Duck, Duck, Dinosaur: Snowy Surprise (My First I Can Read) (Harper, 2017).  In this new book about those off-beat brothers, a sudden snowfall shows the Mama knows best when it comes to bundling up for frosty play. Author George's breezy narrative is easy for new readers to sound out, and artist Oriol Vidal offers her quacky-wacky off-beat illustrations of these unlikely siblings as visual cues to the text. Share this new one with Kellie George's and Orio Vidal's first story of the unlikely family of ducklings and dinosaur, Duck, Duck, Dinosaur. (See review here.)

School Library Journal gives this new one a two wingtips up: "Lots of word repetition combined with a simple but enjoyable plot make this an essential purchase for most beginning-to-read collections."