Her pencil drawings, with clean watercolor washes laid in, are sweetly similar to those in her early board books ( Clap Hands, 1987, etc.). Oxenbury’s charming illustrations depict infants from a variety of ethnicities wearing clothing that invokes a sense of place. Whether from a remote village or an urban dwelling, a tent or the snow, Fox notes that each “of these babies, / as everyone knows, / had ten little fingers / and ten little toes.” Repeated in each stanza, the verse establishes an easy rhythm.

3-5)Ī pleasing poem that celebrates babies around the world.

Bad enough that in a story about rhythm, the verse doesn’t always scan-but must Gerald strike the Travolta pose? Gerald doesn’t find himself he simply learns how to mimic. But probably not readers, even the youngest of whom will want to know just why Gerald’s legs didn’t buckle this time, special music or not.

Suddenly he commences to belt out Olympic-quality gymnastic moves-“Then he did a backward somersault / and leapt up in the air”-that blows the other animals away. As he shuffles homeward, and as he stops to admire the moon, a cricket suggests that “you just need a different song.” So, to the sound of the wind in the trees, Gerald starts to move: a gentle swaying, some circling, and some swishing. And while all the other creatures show some mean moves at the Jungle Dance (“The chimps all did a cha-cha / with a very Latin feel, / and eight baboons then teamed up / for a special Scottish reel”), poor Gerald is hooted off the dance floor before he even has a chance to crumple. Gerald the giraffe’s legs are too spindly for dancing they are always buckling at the knees when it comes to the old soft-shoe. (Sept.Andreae’s ode to a different drummer stumbles when it preaches about uncovering your own beat, but is ferried along by enough sweet verse and Parker-Rees’s dazzling colors that it almost pulls its own weight. His watercolor and pen-and-ink artwork exudes a fun, party vibe. Parker-Rees's kicky depictions of slightly anthropomorphic animals boogying on the dance floor are the highlight here. Andreae's rhyming text has a jaunty rhythm that's likely to spark interest in the read-aloud crowd, in spite of a heavy-handed message. Luckily, a friendly cricket appears in the moonlight, chirping a morale-boosting song of self-confidence that soon sets Gerald in graceful motion. As a multitude of fleet-footed beasts eagerly 'skip and prance' at the annual Jungle Dance in Africa, Gerald feels sad 'because when it comes to dancing/ he was really very bad.' Jeered by waltzing warthogs and cha-cha-ing chimps when he attempts to cut a rug, Gerald hangs his head and leaves the celebration behind. Such is the dilemma in this British team's bouncy if didactic picture book about self-esteem. All the jungle's got the beat, but Gerald the giraffe has four left feet.

Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae