Too Many Cheeps and Peeps! Chick Chat by Janie Bynum

 

BABY CHICK HAS A LOT TO SAY!

It's breakfast time, and between bites from his little bowl of worms, Baby Chick is already full of PEEPS! Daddy Rooster is a bit appalled at his prolific little cheeper. Mom Chicken's small smile conveys both pride and impatience at the peep-athon. Big Sister plops her head down on the table with mock desperation and moans... Puh-leez!

. . ."MAKE IT STOP."

After breakfast Mom Chicken is preoccupied procuring high-protein foods (bugs) for the family's lunch. Papa Rooster perches on the fence post to provide wake-up calls to the public-at-large, and Big Sis Chicken retreats from the perpetual peeping to a spot under a tree, hopefully for respite from some chick lit advice books like A Coop of One's Own and Find Your Inner Chicken. Nobody is up for a cheep chat.

"GO PLAY!" SQUAWKED SISTER.

Baby Chick loads up her little wagon with gardening tools and her plush elephant, and, perpetually peeping as she pulls her load, she stops at a good place to dig. But her little trowel soon strikes something:

THUNK!     . . . . . . . .       PEEP?

It's a big round egg, which apparently doesn't speak Peep. But Baby Chick feels responsible, so, with plenty of peeps, she loads the big egg onto her wagon and pulls it home, where her family is perplexed, but not pleased, at the sight of her find. Mom Chicken points out that the big egg is not Chick's property!

"PUT IT BACK!" SHE SQUAWKS.

But Baby Chick feels responsible. She stands guard, protecting the big egg from falling acorns with her parasol, filling him in on the neighborhood news, and falls asleep on top of him when it gets dark. Mom Chicken has to haul her home to hit the hay with the family. But in the morning at the peep of dawn, Baby Chick is up and peeping, running outside to look for her big egg, where she finds a partly hatched little turtle.

The baby turtle isn't talkative, the perfect pal for Baby Chick, and for the rest of the family....

THAT WAS PERFECTLY OKAY.

It's a pair of pals made in heaven, in Janie Bynum's just published Chick Chat (NorthSouth, 2021). Author Bynum's text is fairly sparse (except for the peeps), leaving plenty of space for illustrator Bynum's piquant comic illustrations that playfully expand the narration. With black ink outlines and perky poultry portrayed in pastel watercolors, even young chatterboxes will get the message, and kids in the primary grades will love the satisfying conclusion for the Chatty Cathys and Silent Sams in the audience. "A sweet story told with gentle humor," chirps Kirkus Reviews.

Robin in Residence! Annie And Snowball and the Cozy Nest by Cynthia Rylant

Annie has made an exciting discovery.

From the porch swing she notices that there's a small nest in the vines growing up the post. The nest grows bigger every day, and soon she notices that it is lined with fur--white fur from Snowball, and brown fur from her cousin Henry's big dog Mudge. And then one day there is a robin sitting in the nest. Annie and Henry check the nest every day from the porch swing, and ...

One day, instead of the robin, there were...

FIVE EGGS! FIVE BLUE EGGS!

Henry's dad made one of his silly jokes.

"SHE'S TRYING TO RAISE A BASKETBALL TEAM!"

Henry and Annie could hardly wait to see the eggs hatch. They checked every day but all was quiet in the nest.

And then, on Saturday morning, while the families were all having a pancake breakfast together, through the window suddenly came a lot of noise from the formerly quiet nest!

AND THERE IN THE NEST WERE FIVE BABY BIRDS, EYES CLOSED, MOUTHS OPEN--

ALL CHEEPING!

And it's breakfast time for all, in Cynthia Rylant's summery story, Annie and Snowball and the Cozy Nest (5) (Simon And Schuster), as Annie and Henry watch the babies have their first worms, and Mudge curls up under the table, making a perfect nest for Snowball's nap. Young beginning readers get to share the fun of watching baby birds hatch while practicing their reading skills with Henry, Mudge, Annie, and Snowball. Artwork by Sucie Stevenson portrays the cozy ambiance just right for young readers who want to follow the big event. For more seasonal adventures of cousins Henry and Annie and their pets, Mudge and Snowball, see Annie and Snowball Collector's Set 2: Annie and Snowball and the Magical House; Annie and Snowball and the Wintry Freeze; Annie and Snowball and the Grandmother Night.

Eggs-capade! The Chickens Are Coming! by Barbara Samuels

One day Mommy, Winston, and Sophie saw an interesting sign:

MY CHICKENS NEED A HOME!
I'm moving and I can't take them with me!

Inexplicably, Daddy declares that chickens can be pets, and Winston immediately expresses a wish to walk a chicken. And before they know it, their backyard is transformed into a hen habitat and ... Sophie declares,

"THE CHICKENS ARE HERE!"

There are five different sorts of hens--Desiree, Daphne, Divina, Delilah, and Dawn--one striped and speckled French hen, one Rhode Island Red, one fat and fluffy Chinese hen, one sleek golden hen, and one with a topknot of long, droopy feathers. They all run away from Winston's attempts to make friends.

"Why don't they like me?" he shouts.

As the chickens settle down in their lovely new coop, the kids can't wait for their eggs--those all-they-can-eat eggs. None are found. What they do find is... ... plenty of chicken poop to scoop!

Sophie serenades the hens with her violin tunes and Winston reads them bedtime stories.

Finally there's a wake up call from the chicken coop.

Buk BUK BAWK!

And the next morning, there are eggs all over the yard, but it seems that the chickens have made an eggs-cape!

THE CHICKENS WERE GONE!

But when Sophie suggests that they follow the poop trail, the kids discover all five hens hanging out in the family room, roosting on the sofa, watching a video, and snacking on last night's leftover pizza.

And there are all the eggs they can eat for breakfast in Barbara Samuels' homey and cozy chicken story, The Chickens Are Coming! (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), illustrated in jolly style by the author to show off the individual differences between family members and their poultry pets. With the new popularity of raising chickens in urban settings, this brownstone-dwelling, adventurous city family stars in a story that hits the ups and downs of poultry raising with good humor and just enough poultry lore for a fun read-aloud that kids will find egg-cellent storytime fare."Samuels gets excellent comic mileage by drawing her hens as unblinkingly unflappable," quips Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal sums this chicken caper up, saying "Chickens rule the roost."

Egg-stra! Egg-stra!: EGG by Kevin Henkes

Four eggs.

Pink, blue, yellow.... and green.

Three eggs begin to crack--first on one side, and then on the other. The pink one is the first to shatter.

surprise!

The next three cracked eggs take their time, but one by one, a yellow bird follows, and then the blue egg hatches, wearing a chip of shell for a cap. Then each tries their wings and flies away.

goodbye!

The green egg remains. Clearly, this egg is not all it's cracked up to be.

The three little birds return to wait, and wait, and wait, watching over their late mate. They take a listen for activity inside. At last they go proactive. They peck and peck and peck with increasing power.

Cracks appear. and then...

surprise!

Climbing out of the green shell is a little alligator. The three birds react. Yipes! Fly away! Fly away!

The little reptilian is left all by himself--all on his lonesome and feeling bad.

But the three birds are as curious as they are afraid. They fly back to check out the new guy. The strange hatchling seems harmless, so....

One by one, they venture closer, and one by one they land on his bumpy green back. He heads for the pond, and they hang on, going for a gator-ride on the quiet waters, seemingly becoming friends as the sinking sun morphs into an egg-shaped ovoid and slides low over the landscape.

Is this where the story ends? Or is there more to tell--perhaps from the reader?

Two things are true of Kevin Henkes' recent picture books: they are lovely to look at and they leave the reader wondering...., and as in his latest, Egg (Greenwillow Books, 2017), wondering what egg-zactly what happened here?

His pastel-paletted text and characters tell a sweet story of unlikely friendship, but most of Henkes' illustrations are placed within grids with four and then sixteen cells, as the Newbery and Caldecott-award winning author-illustrator keeps coming up with a different form of graphic narration. This one is no exception. Is he playing with the graphic contrast of curves and gridded squares? Is he pushing a premise that friendship can't be contained? Or both?

As in his Waiting and When Spring Comes, (see reviews here and here), Kevin Henkes captures attention with irresistible images and builds tension while making the reader tell the story in his or her own way. Here, Henkes' pages are innately lovely to look at, with images framed within a curved brown-ish frame, and arranged in almost wordless storytelling that is at a far remove from the classic spring-cum-Easter tale, one that leaves youngsters asking "what?" and "what if?" "Another stunner from Henkes, who is able to evoke so much with few words and such seemingly simple illustrations," says Kirkus. in a starred review. "Gorgeous and thought-provoking."

Bringing Up Gosling! Mother Goose Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins

Bruce is a recluse.

Bruce is a grouch.

HE DID NOT LIKE SUNNY DAYS.

HE DID NOT LIKE CUTE LITTLE ANIMALS.

BRUCE ONLY LIKED ONE THING--EGGS.

You might say Bruce is a bird watcher. He watches all the birds in the forest, watching for an opportunity to "borrow" their eggs, openly robbing their nests for the delicacies he concocts with his collection of egg recipes borrowed from the internet. One day he comes across an enticing dish, featuring hard-boiled eggs in honey sauce over salmon.

Bruce pulls out his personal shopping cart and sets out to collect the ingredients. He catches some fresh salmon and then relieves the bees of some of their honey.

(HE LIKED TO SUPPORT LOCAL BEES, YOU SEE.)

That only leaves the main attraction--eggs. Luckily, Mrs. Goose has a nice clutch going.

"ARE THESE FREE-RANGE ORGANIC?" HE ASKED.

Back home, Bruce puts the goose eggs in a saucepan to cook, but when he returns with firewood to stoke the stove, he finds four just-hatched goslings standing in a footbath of warm water in the pot.

Now we all know what young birds do when they hatch! Yes! They imprint on the first moving thing they see, and that's ... Mother Goose Bruce!

"MAMA?"

Bruce is nonplussed. He grabs up his gaggle of goslings and heads back to Mrs. Goose's nest to return the defective merchandise. He finds only a sign:

[BE BACK IN APRIL!]

That's not good news. Bruce has got the baby goose blues! They follow him everywhere, despite his stern orders to shoo!

"I'M NOT YOUR MOTHER!"

Perhaps he can induce the geese to migrate. He rigs a slingshot between two saplings to shoot them into a southerly route. No luck. He buys them little single-engine model planes and tries to send them off into the wild blue yonder. They circle back, honking "MAMA!" and wearing warm mufflers and knit caps, all set to winter over with Mother Bruce.

Like it or not, Mother Goose Bruce is stuck raising his little flock. Wearing water wings and swim fins, he dutifully supervises first swimming lessons in their little plastic pool. He books a motel on the beach in Miami, hoping that they'll get the urge to stay south. He suffers through all the usual parental stages:

ANNOYING BABY GEESE.

STUBBORN TEENAGE GEESE.

BORING ADULT GEESE.

It's an unusual blended family, all right, in Ryan T. Higgins hilarious hit, Mother Bruce (Hyperion Books, 2015). Newbie author-illustrator Higgins hits all the marks in this, his first book. His wry and ironic text is pitch perfect in its sly but loving spoof of parenting, and his illustrations are both lovely and comic, opening with a charming woodsy scene reminiscent of Disney's Snow White's forest and beguiling goslings that are kissing-cousin likenesses of Olivier Dunrea's Gossie (Gossie & Friends), and still providing laugh-out loud scenes--game goslings in flight helmets in little open-cockpit airplanes, his "stubborn teenage geese" slouching about with earphones, and Bruce and one grown gosling, stretched out in beach chairs with sunglasses and iced drinks with little umbrellas, while another is followed out of the ocean by a tiny sea turtle, ironically piping "Mama?"

Kids and grownups alike will find a lot to like together in this one, a great family read-aloud. "Visually beautiful, clever, edgy and very funny," says Kirkus' starred review.

No Place Like Home: Nest by Jorey Hurley

Those iconic signs of spring, a nesting pair of robins have woven grasses into the age-old basket shape just as the sun begins to waken the bare trees from their winter rest.

nest

The story begins with the father and mother robin gazing into the nest where they see one robin's-egg-blue egg. The mother settles down to shelter her egg on the nest and the dad flies off to find food and a nearby branch where he can keep watch.

As leaves and blooms peep out, the parent birds know that soon the baby will hatch and after a frenzy of feeding, he will grow feathers and the speckled orange breast of the juvenile. As he gets stronger, he can jump from the nest and from limb to limb in his tree, as Mom and Dad keep a watchful eye, knowing that soon he will fly on his own.

Soon their tree is filled with red berries and the robins feast on them, until they stop to stare in surprise--at a purple kite rising above their tree.

Soon the leaves change colors, the wind begins to blow, and the three robins snuggle together on their perch to sleep. And when they awake, the fledgling dares to soar down to the ground to explore for worms. The older robins watch, somehow seeming to know that their young one will meet another young robin and that when spring returns again, they, too, will build another nest in their tree.

Jorey Hurley's debut picture book, Nest (Simon & Schuster, 2014), uses only thirteen words, one for each two-page spread, to tell the familiar story of the robins' life cycle and the changing seasons. Hurley's illustrations are striking--with a strong but burnished palette in simple line drawings and flat color laid against a matte-white background. Her robins are realistic, without a trace of cartooning or anthropomorphism, but also iconic, without shading or detailing, and her tree is also simple and stylized without losing any of its tree-ness. Preschoolers will be drawn into the little drama as the egg becomes chick and the chick becomes fledgling and then an adult, and emergent readers will have plenty of context to help them read the natural and easy text on their own. The author adds an appendix with extra information about nesting. For classroom units, read this one as an introduction to Rita Gray's delightful Have You Heard the Nesting Bird?

School Library Journal says,"Nest's beauty and originality will stand up to countless re-readings."