Some of These Are Snails
by Carter Higgins; illus. by the author
Preschool    Chronicle    48 pp.
5/23    9781797220185    $15.99

Higgins’s companion to Circle Under Berry (rev. 11/21) invites an encore exploration of shapes, colors, counting, and creatures with a healthy dose of rhythmic fun and conceptual play. Two circles inhabit the first double-page spread: “turtle is a circle / circle is a snail.” The pages are soon populated by circles, squares, and animals of many sizes and colors (“owl is a square”). The book first focuses attention on sorting shape, size, and color before moving on to quantitative terms (some, none, all, etc.): “all of these are ovals / three of them are bees / some of these are octagons / two of those are green.” Comparative adjectives (“wiggly wigglier wiggliest”) add to this concept book’s complexity. Higgins’s simple but effective collaged and digitally assembled illustrations focus attention on the objects at hand. Subsequent rereadings will reinforce the message that there’s never simply one way to look at things.

From the May/June 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.