Bird & Birdie in a Fine Day

PreS-Gr 1 Three episodes tell of a day with two fine feathered friends. In the first entry, a "boy meets girl" tale, readers observe the two birds enjoying one another's company. In the second and third vignettes, they share worms and the materials for making nests together. With a few deft lines of computer-generated art in warm pastels, Long has created two expressive characters who inhabit comic-strip (speech bubbles and all) spreads of one, two, and four panels per page. Bird is bright blue and, as with most female cartoon characters, canary-yellow Birdie has long eyelashes and a bow in her hair to connote her gender. The repetitive language and simple story structure make this read like a beginning reader, but the small font and the vocabulary, with words such as "marvelous" and "stupendous," do not bear this out. While this duo is not as iconic as James Marshall's "George and Martha" (Houghton) or half as funny as Mo Willems's "Elephant and Piggie" series (Hyperion), Long has created an easily digestible introduction to the comic-strip format for the younger set."Rachel G. Payne, Brooklyn Public Library, NY" Copyright 2010 Media Source Inc.