Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.Ī sadly lackluster paean to the premise that “no two snowflakes are alike, / almost, almost… / but not quite.”īeginning with snowflakes, Baker then branches out to celebrate the uniqueness of other things, some found in nature, some manmade-nests, branches, leaves and forests. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!” his lamb baas back. Not quite the crowd pleaser that it could be.Ī succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.Ī grumpy bull says, “DADA!” his calf moos back.

At least the closing twist, in which the rabbit returns to form with “Fart!” in response to a parental order to brush his teeth, requires no translation. Originally published in 2011 in New Zealand (and much reprinted since), the episode first appeared on this continent in 2015 (from another publisher) as Poop-di-doop!-a version of the delightfully daring epithet that American audiences may find more immediately appealing than the original.

In what amounts to a remake of Maurice Sendak’s Pierre with cruder language and an all-animal cast, an anthropomorphic rabbit responds to every request with the titular phrase-including a wolf’s “May I eat you?” Down the hatch goes the lippy lapin, and now the wolf’s only words are “Poo bum.” This signals the wolf’s villainy to the rabbit doctor summoned to help, and he proceeds to reach down his patient’s gullet and pull out his “little poo bum!” “Good heavens, Father! How dare you call me that? You know perfectly well my name is Simon.” The pithy narrative’s heavy typeface accords well with both the level of humor and the illustrations’ thick, simply drawn lines and broad swathes of opaque primary hues. An encounter with a wolf has remarkable effects on the vocabulary of a snarky little bunny.

Poo Bum by Stéphanie Blake