Let's Eat!

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Everybody eats, and this book shows what, from where and how. Minimal text combines with many small-scale drawings on each page to show kids and animals munching, nibbling and gobbling. A second section shows how foods come from the farm, the sea, the garden and the orchard. Then readers tour the kitchen, check out equipment and look at where people eat (everywhere), brush up on their manners and wind up with a page of ``food tricks.'' The joy of eating is the theme, and the encyclopedic treatment makes an unusual picture book. Children will pore over the pages, each one full of jokes, cartoons and a variety of jazzy details. Ages 3-6. (Apr.)

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1-- A catalog of food-related pictures with a minimum of words which will appeal to young food lovers. Similar in appeal to the Ahlbergs' The Baby's Catalogue (Little, 1983), Let's Eat divides food and eating into categories such as favorite foods, holiday treats, food from gardens, food from orchards, and the like using clear, whimsical, simple yet expressive watercolor and pen-and-ink illustrations. Children, adults, and even foods pictured are multi-ethnic. Humorous insights are verbally and pictorially interspersed throughout--a squirrel pulling a peanut from an elephant's trunk is an example of ``not sharing'' and a pizza dough twirling above the baker's head is ``pie in the sky.'' Kelley illustrates moments familiar to both child and adult--``Hungry Times'' includes the last minute before lunch in school, looking in a bakery window, and a ``bacon alarm clock'' as the scent of sizzling bacon wafts into a tent awakening a child in a sleeping bag. ``Food Tricks'' will amuse those who have ever decked their fingers with pitted olives or blown bubbles into milk. Primary teachers will want to use this book when teaching about food and nutrition and classification. Public libraries will find it ideal for the toddler shelf. --Louise L. Sherman, Anna C. Scott School, Leonia, N.J.