TEN IN A HURRY

Ten colorful fish scurry to school, but a larger fish gobbles them up one by one.

Employing the same progressive flap style as in his previous work Ten on a Twig (2020), Cole moves counting practice from up in the air to under the sea. Ten fish swim in a straight line across the graduated pages, with the smallest at the right margin and the largest just to the right of the gutter. The first flap is flipped, and “GULP,” that large, pink fish is eaten by a shadowy gray predator, barely visible against the black background. Now there are only “9/ in a hurry / don’t want / to be late… // Purple goes next. / That leaves eight.” Both the number and color name in the text match the corresponding fish’s hue (also, the predator’s eye changes to match the color of the fish that has just been eaten). The fish stand out starkly against the inky black pages—and, alas, so do fingerprints. This clever concept book takes readers from 10 to one, when all that is left is a tiny red fish. That fish turns around, plucks up its courage, and shouts: “WE WON’T BE EATEN!” All of the fish in the larger fish’s belly hear the rallying cry and plot their (gaseous) escape. Similar in concept but varying in execution to Andy Mansfield and Thomas Flintham’s One Lonely Fish (2017), pair it with that earlier work for plenty of underwater chomping.

Flipping flaps and survival of the fittest.