The Pelican Can!
by Toni Yuly; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary    Little, Brown    40 pp.
5/24    9780316497817    $18.99

Yuly’s well-designed picture book presents a series of playful rhyming questions (“Who can soar down close to the shore?” “Who can fly up high in the sky?”) followed by the refrain, “The pelican can! The pelican can!” While young listeners and emerging readers will enjoy the predictability of the interactive format, Yuly delivers plenty of page-turning visual drama. She sets pelicans—sometimes rendered in thick black outlines, other times in solid silhouettes—against striking torn-paper seascapes as they travel from nest, to sea, and back to nest again. With each question-and-answer couplet, shifting color palettes depict the peaceful blue-black nighttime that bookends the story, the splendor of sunrise and sunset, and the bright daylight in between. Artfully placed text mimics the pelicans’ path as they fly, dive, “SPLASH!,” and scoop, enhancing the book’s visual delight and the appeal of decoding words and images as readers follow the pelicans from page to page. Sure, “The pelican can! The pelican can!” And the viewer can, too.

From the May/June 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.