This Is MY Fort! by Drew Daywalt, and: What Is Inside THIS Box? by Olivier Tallec

Abstract

Reviewed by: This Is MY Fort! by Drew Daywalt, and: What Is Inside THIS Box? by Olivier Tallec Deborah Stevenson Daywalt, Drew This Is MY Fort!; illus. by Olivier Tallec. Orchard/Scholastic, 2019 [56p] (Monkey & Cake) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14390-4 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14391-1 $5.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 1-2 What Is Inside THIS Box?; illus. by Olivier Tallec. Orchard/Scholastic, 2019 [56p] (Monkey & Cake) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14386-7 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14387-4 $5.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 1-2 This new beginning reader series from Drew Daywalt (author of The Day the Crayons Quit, BCCB 11/13) features friends Monkey (a chipper red-capped simian) and Cake (a cherry-topped slice of sheet cake miraculously endowed with a face and limbs). In This Is MY Fort, Cake makes a fort with a blanket, pole, and armchair and then declares it a Cake-only zone ("No Monkeys are allowed in my fort"); clever Monkey then declares everything outside of Cake's fort to be Monkey territory ("Your fort is a cage. You are in a cage, Cake! A CAKE CAGE!"), leading to Cake's repentance and shared forts. In What Is Inside THIS Box, Monkey carries a big cardboard box that contains a "magic cat" ("Because the cat disappears when I open the box"). A flummoxed Cake tries to negotiate this notion, then decides there's actually a magic dinosaur in the box, whereupon the two friends agree to disagree. The odd friends, simple text in contrastingly colored speech balloons, and snappy use of controlled vocabulary are familiar from Willems' Elephant and Piggie, but no less enjoyable for that. Daywalt takes those components in an interestingly conceptual dimension in both titles, though, slyly tickling not only kids' funny bones but also their STEM bones (Schrödinger's cat is even explicitly captioned on the endpaper of Box, and the endpaper slogan for the series is "Read. Laugh. Think"). Illustrations are acrylic paint and pencil vignettes, featuring the highly kinetic figures of our protagonists balanced against generous white space and crisp, geometric speech balloons. These will be perfect for novice readers who enjoy a bit of brain-teasing as well as a comedy buddy act. DS Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois