Splish, Splash, Splosh! : A Book about Water

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1There is not enough story to make this picture book fiction, and not enough fact to make it nonfiction, although the CIP places it in 553.7. In an oversimplification of the water cycle, a boy and his dog follow water from ocean to sink to sewer. With the tedious refrain of "Splish, splash, splosh," each page includes a main chunk of text and a watercolor illustration, as well as smaller pictures and diagrams with additional text that adds little and is sometimes just plain wrong. For example, children are told, "Sometimes frogs and small fish can be sucked up into the clouds and fall with the rain somewhere else" and that three types of clouds are "fine day clouds," "thunder clouds," and "grey day clouds." Pass on this one and stick with Joanna Cole's The Magic School Bus: At the Waterworks (Scholastic, 1986).Yapha Nussbaum Mason, Brentwood Lower School, Los Angeles