UP, UP, UP! IT’S APPLE-PICKING TIME

Apple-themed disquisitions for younger readers tend to be set in the Northeast or Midwest, but Shapiro draws on personal experiences in California to give this one a different slant. Up at sunrise, a family piles into the car for the half-day trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s canyon “apple ranch.” After picking up windfalls for cider, and climbing ladders to pick Granny Smiths, Red and Gold Delicious, Winter Bananas, Macintosh, and “a few stray Gravensteins,” all return to the house for Pippin pie, then, next day open up a busy roadside stand. Shapiro laces her narrative with evocations of that heavenly taste and smell, and caps it with a yummy-looking recipe for microwave-baked apples. Using painted-paper collage to create a wide range of surface textures and artfully blended colors, Harvill sandwiches scenes of smiling figures amid lush, rough-barked trees between endpapers dotted with common apple varieties. A perfect dessert after Gibbons’s Apples (2000) or another of the plethora of informational titles. (Picture book. 5-7)