I Hear a Pickle (and Smell, See, Touch, and Taste It, Too!) by Rachel Isadora (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- I Hear a Pickle (and Smell, See, Touch, and Taste It, Too!) by Rachel Isadora
ISBN 978-0-399-16049-3 $16.99
Reviewed from galleys R* 2-4 yrs
This fetching concept book from veteran author/illustrator Isadora offers a gallery of sensory experiences broken into sections for each of the five senses. Under “I Hear,” for instance, kids note what they hear (“I hear the birdie”; “I hear the bee. [End Page 308] Uh-oh!”) and sometimes don’t hear (“I don’t hear the worm,” says the girl looking intently at the very quiet worm) in a variety of settings, from outside to inside, rural to urban. The result has the gently carnivalesque charm of Krauss and Sendak’s A Hole Is to Dig as kids weigh in on different experiences and responses in multiple vignettes per page. Some of the vignettes are self-contained moments of poetry (“I touch the rain”); sometimes a sequence provides a satisfying bijou story (“I don’t see the words in my book./ I wear my glasses. I see the words!”). Delicate lines with simple watercolor shading and patterns keep the small tableaux simple, but they’re vivid with life from the multicultural cast of bouncy kids and the evocation of life’s sensory encounters, from the homely smell of baby poo to the glorious vision of fireworks. This will be excellent fodder for sharing in a preschool curriculum, and audiences will be chiming in to offer their own examples of what they hear, see, and most definitely smell.
