A verse about temperature - “Cool is cool and hot is hot / Depending on the spot you’ve got” - comes to life with penguins marching across an ice-blue panel. This book doesn’t stop at extremes of size it depicts all kinds of traits with rhyming couplets and contrasting animals on double-page spreads. Patrick Lewis, with illustrations by Bob Barner. A set of bath decals is included at the end, perfect for playing “I’m the Biggest Thing in This Bathtub.” (In what may be a conciliatory gesture toward the squid, it includes most of the other animals from the book, but not the largest one: the whale.)Ī whale also wins the role of biggest beast in “Big Is Big,” by J. Sherry’s story is a simple, infectious delight, with wonderful comic timing and repetition that will encourage children to chant along. “I’m the biggest thing in this whale!” he declares. Seeing them, he reverts to his old, irrepressible self. He sizes up the scene: he’s alive, but not alone - the smaller creatures from the earlier pages are there, too. He even dwarfs a gatefold spread, which extends to reveal a parade of fish that are all, of course, smaller than he is.įor a moment the squid looks worried. Clever composition amplifies the squid’s size: he’s too big to fit in his own book. Sherry’s illustrations are refreshingly uncluttered, with colorful shapes rendered in watercolor, cut paper and ink, making it easy for young children to follow the story. I’m even bigger than this octopus.” His tentacles gesture toward the other animals, who seem cheerfully unaware that the squid is one-upping them all. The squid smiles proudly and rattles off a list of sea creatures he out-sizes. “I’m a giant squid and I’m big,” he begins. (Just ask Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, who had a hit in 1998 with “Squids Will Be Squids.”) Now the author-illustrator Kevin Sherry has cast a squid - a giant squid, no less - as the boastful protagonist of his first children’s book, “I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean.” Until recent years, some of the biggest ones remained a deep-sea mystery, darting away from scientists’ prying eyes.
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