FARM ANIMALS

A baby's favorite game gets a barnyard setting.

The peekaboo pastime is brought to the farm in this board book. Little ones are given a series of clues and encouraged to look through a die-cut window to the next page and guess which animal resides there. “I have long EARS and two large front TEETH. I hop around the farm to find delicious CARROTS to eat. I am a.…” Opposite this clue is a brown box with an open flap that exposes a round eye in a partially hidden blue face. With the turn of the page, readers see a rabbit from hips up chomping on a carrot. Other animals depicted are a pig, a rooster, a cow, a chick, and, in a nicely democratic gesture, a child. The prose clues are certainly necessary, as the grainy-textured illustrations are sometimes not clear enough to clue readers in to what they're looking at. This makes for an interesting guessing game but a pretty poor peekaboo exercise. Older readers will eventually figure out what's going on, but young tots will just be frustrated. Three other books in the series—At Night, Look at Me, and Knock, Knock, Who Lives Here?—publish simultaneously. 

A simple game needlessly complicated.