GOT TO DANCE

Nakata’s joyously exuberant watercolor illustrations flow gracefully throughout this story of an African-American child’s summer day filled with playful dance movements. The unnamed little girl and her grandfather spend the day together, making pancakes, playing on the sidewalk, and visiting the zoo, with some additional solo activities for the child, such as bouncing on the bed and playing dress-up. Each activity inspires a different type of unstructured dancing by the little girl, with her grandfather often joining in. Sometimes the dancing is purely imaginary (hopping like a penguin or twirling up into the clouds in shoes with wings) and sometimes the movements are related to actual dance varieties such as a jig or tap dancing. The hand-lettered text describing the dancing activities is not as agile as it should be for a dance-themed story: sometimes it’s hard to read aloud, and sometimes it stumbles in rhyme or rhythm. The story strains for agility and comes across as rather pedestrian, but the bouncy illustrations are full of razzle-dazzle that fulfills the promise of the title. (Picture book. 3-5)