AMANDA BEAN'S AMAZING DREAM

The protagonist in this story has a sort of low-grade obsessive/compulsive disorder: “I count anything and everything,” chirps Amanda. The problem is that Amanda’s class is moving on to multiplication and she just doesn’t get it. So she keeps counting things one by one until a dream of too many sheep, too many knitting needles, and too many sweaters pushes her over the edge. Amanda’s story is the forgettable vehicle for what is really at stake here: to disclose the mysteries of multiplication. While the illustrations make the concept graphically obvious, the text can be confusing: “I know about the multiplication sign, X. It means that things can come in groups, or rows, or columns,” but “What I do not know are the multiplication facts.” The term multiplication table is avoided, to no positive effect. At the end of the book, Marilyn Burns (The Greedy Triangle, 1995, etc.) does a credible, if prim, job of explaining the broad contexts of multiplication to adults working with children. (Picture book. 6-10)