Peepsqueak Wants a Friend!

PreS-K—When all the chicks on the farm pair up two by two, Peepsqueak is left looking for a friend. Sporting a red T-shirt with the initials P.S. on his chest, the little chick repeats the rhyming couplet, "You are 2, but I am 1/my search for a friend has just begun." Unfortunately, the font chosen for printing the pronoun "I" and the numeral "1" will look very similar to youngsters following along as the text is read aloud. The repeated refrain, "hopped, skipped, jumped, and skittered" down the path, is more successful in fostering visual literacy and word recognition because Clark uses the same four colors each time it recurs. Cartoonlike artwork was created with pen and finished using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. When Peepsqueak befriends an enormous brown bear, the other chicks are afraid and run away. This ambiguous scenario seems to imply that big or small, one can find a friend, or perhaps it's an admonishment to the other chicks as Peepsqueak shouts, "Friends don't just come in 2s./Real friends make room for all!" The book ends with all of the chicks gathered around Bear, who reads them a story. Olivier Dunrea's Gideon and Otto (Houghton Harcourt, 2012) also models friendship with others who are different.—Blair Christolon, Prince William Public Library System, Manassas, VA