BUBBLE KISSES

A little girl has a goldfish named Sal, who gives her special kisses.

The book opens with endpapers filled with bubbles and musical notes and concludes with endpapers that add sea horses, sax-playing turtles, a brown-skinned mermaid (who might resemble the book’s celebrity author), and the brown-skinned protagonist-as-mermaid, dancing with Sal. Wearing her hair in a big, maroon afro puff, the child takes Sal everywhere and is rewarded with Sal’s “bub-bub-bub-bub-bubble kiss[es].” Williams’ verse can best be described as pedestrian: “She can’t roar like a lion, bark like a dog, / scratch like a cat, or jump like a frog, // run like a deer, or do a hummingbird hover. / But here’s the reason that I really love her.” In the realistic parts of the story, the girl wears pants and a shirt, but in the fantasy scenes, she has a mermaid’s tail and she and Sal meet merpeople. In the colorful but generic illustrations, both adult and child merpeople have varying-colored skin and tails, but with identically shaped eyes and facial features, this offers only a veneer of racial diversity. The ending paints the underwater portion as a dream. Ironically, despite the monotonous refrain about bubble kisses, Whitaker never illustrates the fish and girl smooching, which raises the question: What, exactly, are bubble kisses? Though unavailable for review, a music CD of the song accompanies this book.

Some songs don’t make good books. This is one of them.