At first, Rosie is very taken with her new  little sister, Buttercup. But before long, she begins to resent Buttercup’s messy intrusion into her life and tries to give her away. So begins this unexceptional tale of sibling rivalry.

Despite the book’s suggested age range, the language is sophisticated. B.C. writer Chieri Uegaki avoids simplified sentence structure and vocabulary in addressing her young audience. The long, complicated sentences go into great detail about the subtleties of Rosie’s emotional life as she struggles with jealous resentment: “One morning, Rosie woke up feeling peevish, and as she listened to Buttercup whistling in her sleep nearby, a tiny idea that had been smoldering in her head burst into flame.”

And yet the tale itself lacks oomph. Without a more engaging plot, the story comes across as unnecessarily wordy rather than playful and respectful of children’s intelligence, like Rudyard Kipling’s language in the Just So stories. It is no surprise that Rosie comes to miss the role that Buttercup plays in her life, nor are we worried when Oxford, the babysitter to whom she has given Buttercup, takes a couple of seconds to decide whether he really wants to return the baby.

Stéphane Jorisch is the illustrator of numerous picture books and has won three Governor General’s Awards for his work. He and Uegaki collaborated previously on Suki’s Kimono. Once again, Jorisch’s inimitable, scribbly watercolour-and-pen drawings are a pleasure to look at. And yet his uniquely eccentric style is better suited to an equally eccentric story – as seen in his own recent illustration of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat. The vaguely rodentlike Rosie and Buttercup just aren’t unusual enough – although Jorisch does lovely work with the beloved pet crickets, Eenie and Meenie, that Rosie offers up in exchange for her dearly missed little sister.