It is easy to see why Wild About Books won an E.B. White Read Aloud Award.
Judy Sierra’s 2004 picture book has a perfect picture book premise: a librarian driving a bookmobile accidentally drives it into the zoo. Once she’s parked there, librarian Molly McGrew sets up shop like usual, opening the bookmobile to the world.
And the animals take advantage of this. They come, they get books, and they start reading.
They read in large, colorful images by Marc Brown, and readers experience this wonderfully ridiculous story through those illustrations, and through Sierra’s smooth and witty rhymes. (For example, llamas read “while eating their llunches.”
One nice detail about this book is that it is layered. You can read it the first time through for the fun story and images.
Then, when you read it again, you can turn the page to get better views of the books the animals are reading, and get more laughs–the hyena is reading a joke book–or gentle smiles, as when a bunny reads Goodnight Moon. (Bunnies are the main characters in Goodnight Moon.)
And that leads to another of the book’s pleasures: it refers to other books. The otter reads Harry Potter, for example, and one bear reads Big Bad Bruce (a Bill Peet book featuring a bear) with clear pleasure.
Highly recommended.
