We spend a disproportionate amount of time at the library parked in the stacks in front of the Lucy Cousins shelf. Her “Maisy” books have been in heavy rotation all fall and winter, which has been kind of maddening. As much as I can appreciate Maisy and her adventures, I do wonder if Maisy *ever* frowns (except in “Maisy Big, Maisy Small,” of course). And after repeatedly reading such varied titles as “Sweet Dreams Maisy,” “Maisy Goes to Bed,” and “Maisy’s Bedtime,” I’ve pretty much reached my limit. So I was happy to find “Hooray for Fish!” on the shelf next to all the Maisy books and happier still that it was compelling enough to subvert a fourth reading of “Maisy Goes Camping.”

“Hooray for Fish!” features a little fish who is greeting all of her fishy friends. She greets the spotty fish, the stripy fish, the happy fish, the gripy fish, etc. The fish are colorful and clever in such a way that makes it fun to talk about all of them. There’s a fish that looks like a bee, one that looks like a strawberry, and an “ele-fish,” which looks like an elephant. The text is pleasantly rhyming, but with only a few words on each page you don’t feel rushed by the rhymes. The illustrations have the same look as the Maisy books–heavy black lines and bold, solid colors–but you’ll never once have to wonder if that damned squirrel’s name is pronounced “Sigh-ril” or “See-ril.”

The illustrations in “Welcome to the Zoo” are all two-page spreads of the type of zoo that we all wish we could visit: where giraffes sneak licks of your ice cream cone when you’re not looking, gorillas sit on benches, reading the paper as you walk by, and you have to watch out for penguins sliding across your path on their way to lunch. It’s a fanciful book where the animals and people do both ordinary and extraordinary things. The pictures are warm and bright, done with oil paint and a crackling varnish that gives them an old fashioned feel. There are no words (a quality I love in a book), but amid the chaos at the zoo there are stories hidden within the pictures. Sometimes we tell the little stories, other times we do more of an “I Spy…” kind of thing. The endpapers have hints of more things to look for.

It’s a funny thing, watching a kid reconcile the images of animals she has only seen in books with the real things at the zoo. A monkey in a book incites squeals of joy and cries of “swing! ape! greela!” But real life gorillas, even ones with tiny little babies in tow, were of no interest. Watching a grizzly bear catching and eating a live fish? Ho hum at the time, but a story we tell over and over again now, partly because the grizzlies in “Welcome to the Zoo” are also eating fish. And thanks to the zoo visit she now realizes that animals eat real fish, not goldfish crackers. Perhaps some food chain friends are in our future.

The premise is that for the class’s 100th day of kindergarten, each student has to bring in 100 of something. The students range from pigs to voles and their teacher, Miss Bindergarten, is a dog. The pages alternate between illustrations of the children getting ready (“Patricia sorts her crayons. Quentin* revs toy cars. Raffie lifts the lid up on one hundred dinosaurs.” ) and scenes of Miss Bindergarten getting ready for the 100th day of kindergarten. The first few times I read this book, I felt a sense of melancholy surrounding Miss Bindergarten’s preparations. We see her walking through the rain to get to her classroom, umbrella dripping as she lugs tote bags and carts full of supplies. And we see her making ice cubes at home in her pajamas the night before. In each case, she looks like she’s exhausted from the effort. But the more I read it, the more I felt soothed by the calmness of her work. After all, doesn’t everyone want to have a patient, dedicated kindergarten teacher who cooks up mini-celebrations that involve counting and sharing and 100th day punch?

"Ian brings a relative who's lived a hundred years."

"Miss Bindergarten gets ready for the 100th day of kindergarten."

With its hodgepodge of colors and strangely anthropomorphized animals (e.g. a dog in duck shoes, a trenchcoat, and a kerchief), the illustrations didn’t immediately draw me in. But each page is incredibly detailed with wonderful kindergarten-y things: labelled cubbies tucked into shelves, drawings of each kid’s favorite food hanging on the wall, and an aquarium with 100 baby fish. As Miss Bindergarten moves around the room you find yourself spotting the same objects from a new perspective. That “Can you find…?” quality combined with the animals, letters, and numbers makes this one book that I’m hoping we’re still reading when Zadie’s in kindergarten.

* Quick! Can you think of a marsupial that starts with the letter Q?

“Creatures of the Desert World” features a similar set of animals, but presented in a truly amazing pop-up/action format. When you pull on something, it doesn’t just slide in the direction you’re pulling. Instead, the animals jump, pounce, and flap in surprisingly creative ways. At this point, I think we’ve found every little lizard, pocket mouse, and snake that there is to find, but for a long time we’d discover something new during each reading. Some of our favorite features are the cacti that stand a good 8 inches high off the page, a pack rat that scurries into a nest that’s viewable only by opening a secret door in a cactus, baby wrens nestled that can be seen through the window in the cactus spines, and peccaries that you can barely see peeking out of the sand.

We have lots of books featuring photos of animals and a great many more with animals that are so anthropomorphized that they’re unrecognizable (um, Arthur is an anteater). This is one of the few books we have with realistic, artistic portrayals of animals in their natural habitats. The illustrations are lovely, and I get a kick out of the fact that the book had an illustrator (Barbara Gibson), an Art Director (Jody Bolt), and two Paper Engineers (John Strejan and James Roger Diaz).

My mother-in-law gave this book to Zadie when she was only 6 months old, and I remember thinking that it would be years before she’d be able to understand that some books need to be handled with care. But she’s an unusually gentle kid (and unusually smart, but whose kid isn’t?) so we pulled this book off the shelves several months ago and it has been a staple ever since. But parents of spastic rippers should probably keep this on a high shelf until their children go to college.

The line comes from Anne Miranda’s “To Market, To Market,” the story of a woman who brings home animal after animal, each one adding to the chaos in her home. The former vegan in me cringed when I opened the book for the first time and read the familiar “To market, to market to buy a fat pig, home again home again jiggity jig.” I figured that a book geared toward toddlers wouldn’t end with a cleaver and a turducken, but I was nervous. Thankfully, after the animals lay eggs in her cupboards, eat her shoes, frolic in the bathtub, and roost on her head, she gives up on whatever plans she had for them. Accompanied by all of the animals, she goes back to the market to get a bunch of vegetables and makes a big pot of soup for everyone.

“To Market, To Market”  features animals and vegetables. The illustrations consist of collages of black and white photos of ’60s era supermarkets overlain with  colorful acrylic, pastel, and pencil drawings. The combination is winning, particularly when you get things like a cow painted on top of a photo of a dairy aisle. Photos of the deli counter are suspiciously absent.

The rhyming text is repetitive and rhythmic, which makes it easy for little ones to chime in with the next word or line. Zadie has loved this book since she was about a year old, and it was one of the first books that she mimicked. When the woman declares “There’s a duck on my head,” Zadie would get up from my lap, find one of her toy ducks, sit back down, and put it on top of her head. We have a hardback copy of this book, but there’s a nice, big board book version, too.