This trio of Annick Press books for the very young invites lively interaction between parent and child, talking about the pictures and relating them to the child’s own experience. Pierre Pratt, who has won many major awards for his illustrations in such books as My Dog Is an Elephant and Uncle Henry’s Dinner Guests, imposes drastic limits on himself in these little board books. In rough and energetic outline against vivid background colour, each page presents one aspect of the title character – my cat’s tail, my father’s nose, my sister’s knee. The final picture draws it all together, showing the young narrator with the family member whose parts he has been presenting. The simplicity of the subject matter, while it may be quite absorbing for a toddler learning the names of the body parts, allows no scope for the whimsical narrative elements that distinguished other Pratt books. Each book is actually two-in-one: after the seventh
picture – of Dad (or Sister, Mom or Cat), the reader turns the book upside down to learn about another character.

In comparison with the Pratt board books, Finding Kate’s Shoes seems quite complex, although it has no words at all. Like other picture books that promote attentive “reading” of illustrations in order to find a concealed item or clue, this first book by London, Ontario, artist Erica Dornbusch teases the reader to help Kate find her red sneakers, cunningly hidden among the many items on each page. This book is also somewhat reminiscent of John Burningham’s Shirley books in that the pictures implicitly contrast the mundane realistic world of the adult – Kate’s mother hunting madly through the house for the missing shoes so she can leave for work – with the imaginative world of the child. The child’s fantasy turns a fish bowl into an undersea garden, the refrigerator into a polar landscape, and the clothes dryer into a desert scene complete with cactus and vulture (and, of course, the elusive red sneakers). The pictures are presented with enough detail and humour to stand up to repeated viewings, and the clues on the last page should promote a lively discussion about how those shoes got lost and found again.