THE INCREDIBLE WATER SHOW

The fifth-graders from Frasier’s Miss Allaneus: A Vocabulary Disaster (2000) are back in a bloated attempt to present basic water concepts. Here, in a quest for extra credit, the students stage a play about the subject. Sage, Starr, Forest, and friends use props and physical gestures to explain basic facts, including the molecular make-up of water and the water cycle. But speech bubbles and activity overflow Frasier’s full-bleed spreads. There’s simply too much going on to make concepts clear. In the final pages, a pirate inexplicably appears, quoting Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and decrying the lack of fresh water on board his ship. Rendered with markers, in the same bright, bold style as Miss Allaneus, the illustrations have a distinctly school-like style. (Picture book. 8-10)