Five Little Ducks

by Justine Smith

This is a board book version of the five-little-ducks rhyme. I've become familiar with it through a few different versions I read with my older child when she was small. Momma duck has five babies who go off swimming, and each time she quacks to call them back, one is missing. At the end she quacks again and they all come back. There are a few things about this book that try to be cute and clever, but they just didn't work well for us. The number of diminishing ducklings is achieved by using cutouts on the pages. The duckies have little gold foil patches on their wings but they're so small and dull that they hardly get noticed, and certainly don't have any texture. Overall I was kinda disappointed with the illustrations- they're nice but rather bland. Not overly cute, or bright, or accurate, so I was left just thinking meh. The one thing that made me pick up this book is that when you turn the last page it makes a quacking sound. My baby was thrilled with this at first, she even laughed and wanted it to happen again. But the rest of the book never holds her attention long enough to get to the quacking. I end up having to truncate the rhymes so we get through the pages fast enough to get to the only part she really likes- the noise.

rating: 2/5 ..... 12 pages, 2007