K-Gr 2—Always curious, Livingstone Columbus Magellan Crouse loves to explore the great outdoors. Every day, he forsakes the toys in his bedroom to search and spy outside, collecting whatever natural treasures he comes across. His mother complains when he brings home a pocketful of bugs; undeterred, he goes out to find something to replace the unappreciated insects. In the spirit of Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Harper & Row, 1985), the situation snowballs, becoming more and more ridiculous. Livingstone Columbus Magellan tracks down successively larger animals, moving on to a mouse and then a pig, sneaking in a moose from the forest and graduating to a circus elephant and then a whale. Poor Mrs. Crouse becomes increasingly perturbed, reprimanding her son in irate rhyme. "Livingstone Columbus Magellan Crouse,/please get that hog out of my house!/I told you twice, but I won't shout./For the third time, just show it out!" Finally, the woman sighs with relief when her little boy takes the whale and leaves the house. When once again he comes home with a bug, she simply shrugs and hugs him. The precisely composed ink drawing, painting, and Photoshop illustrations, which set the tale in the halcyon age when men wore hats and women donned aprons, add an old-fashioned charm and much humor to the story. Pair this one with Jane O'Connor's Fancy Nancy: Explorer Extraordinaire (HarperCollins, 2009) to delight young nature lovers during story-hour.—Linda L. Walkins, Mount Saint Joseph Academy, Brighton, MA
Livingstone's mom forbids him from bringing bugs into the house. He lugs home progressively larger and more intrusive animals (mouse, pig, moose, etc.), until she's only too happy to accommodate an insect. The book's pacing is excellent, with the rhymes tumbling along (Livingstone, deliciously, doesn't say a word throughout). Ercolini is especially good at showing the cringe-inducing damage leveled inside the house.
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