Snowboy 1, 2, 3

PreS-K–This counting book is enlivened by vibrant Adobe Photoshop illustrations. The story starts with “one snowboy all alone./Two children unaware./Three ancient apple trees./Four apples in the air.” It goes up to ten carrots on a party cake and counts back down to one snowboy at the end. Each page has one sentence of rhyming text. Initially there is a lot of white space that soon turns into extremely busy multicolored pages. The quirky snowpeople and snowcat interact with the children and the animals and a number of small visual details add most of the humor. On one page, a child drops a glove, which is picked up by a raven; the raven is seen with it on a number of successive pages until the count has gone back to two, where the child retrieves it.  Spiders spin snowflake-shaped webs, and bunnies frolic in the background. Some of the illustrations have an almost woodcut quality. Other aspects, particularly the backgrounds, are very flat. This is a counting book where there isn’t any confusion about the number stated on that spread and the number of items to count. A serviceable seasonal addition.–B. Allison Gray, Goleta Public Library, CA