SKIDAMARINK

This engaging piece of tomfoolery will be a fidgety reader’s delight (though it must have been a bookmaker’s nightmare). The scant and cockamamie text can be read as a poem or a song, and it is revealed to the reader by turning double flaps that unfold on each page. This provides for plenty of hands-on action. A polar bear and a penguin—of the naïvely drawn, cuter-than-buttons persuasion—are skating about on an iceberg. “Skidamarink,” says a fold. “A-dink,” says the next and the next. (Penguin splashes off the edge.) Next it’s bear’s turn to be saved by penguin. Ultimately, and rather haltingly, the verse emerges: “Skidamarink a-dink a-dink, skidamarink a-doo, I love you.” (Penguin’s skated a heart in the ice.) “I love you in the morning and in the afternoon. I love you in the evening and underneath the moon.” The duet continues until the two are seated on the edge, looking at the moon. Each page fuels and satisfies expectations as the foldouts deliver their goods, and it is a testament to Karas’s sweetly disarming artwork that these two don’t appear an oddly matched couple, but made for one another. (Picture book. 2-5)