One Lonely Seahorse

One Lonely Seahorse

Product DescriptionIn a counting book by the creators ofHow Are You Peeling?where everything is sculpted from food, one lonely sea horse learns that she has a lot of friends--friends she can really "count" on.Amazon.com ReviewFruits and vegetables speak louder than words, and Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers (Play with Your Food,How Are You Peeling?) sure know how to tell a tale with produce. Bea--a lonely sea horse made out of Chioggia beets--is the star of this extraordinary counting book. (We know she's made of beets because the endpapers identify all the produce used in the lovely underwater seascapes--from cantaloupes to enoki mushrooms.) We know Bea is lonely, too, because sea horses just don't get any lonelier than this: Beneath the ocean, deep and wide, One lonely, drifting sea horse cried, "In all the cold and salty sea I'm all alone--there's only me." Fortunately, other sea creatures are eager to befriend her--two small mushroom crabs, three horned melon puffer fish, four ginger lobsters (we never knew fresh ginger looked exactly like lobsters), five pineapple turtles, six banana dolphins, seven cranberry-bean eels, eight banana-peel octopi, nine Asian eggplant mackerel, and ten bell-pepper angelfish. By the end of the book, Bea is surrounded by her colorful new friends in a glorious undersea cornucopia: "'You are my friends,' said Bea, 'that's true, / And I can always count on you!'" We can honestly say there is not a child or adult alive who could resist the charms of this visually breathtaking book, carefully composed and crisply photographed. Chefs, marine biologists, kids, rejoice! One Lonely Sea Horse is a fabulous tribute to food, figures, photography, and friendship. (Toddler to adult) --Karin SnelsonFrom School Library JournalPreSchool-Grade 3-Although there is nothing innovative about the story, this counting book from the creators of How Are You Peeling? (Scholastic, 1999) is worth a second look. As a solitary sea horse ("Her name was Bea, and Bea was blue/And as she cried her sadness grew") moves through the ocean, she meets two small crabs, three puffer fish, and so on, until she finds herself surrounded by a variety of new underwater friends. The rhyming text is mediocre; however, the illustrations, created out of fruits and vegetables, are amazing. Red and yellow peppers, placed at just the right angle and embellished with eyes, magically become a school of angelfish. Lobsters made from ginger rest on mushrooms that look like the ocean floor, while turtles with pineapple shells swim nearby. Bananas with their tops cut open to resemble snouts make a convincing group of dolphins that dive around a coral constructed out of unshelled fava beans. Each turn of the page reveals a cleverly conceived and executed scene that evokes a remarkably realistic underwater moment. All of the edibles are identified on the back endpapers. Aside from being fun to look at, this imaginative book would make a great jumping-off point for art projects or even a unit on food.Joy Fleishhacker, formerly at School Library Journal Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.From BooklistThe expert food sculpting team behindHow Are You Peeling? is back with another produce-inspired offering. In beautifully photographed dioramas, fruits and vegetables are transformed into sea flora and fauna in an underwater counting adventure that begins with Bea, a little sea horse made from beets. Simple, rhyming couplets describe her successful search for friends, who appear in gradually increasing groups of doctored food, ending with a school of 10 bell pepper angelfish. As in the authors' previous book, the edible characters are wonderfully expressive, with a wide range of emotions captured through the use of a few simple slits and seeds. Well-known foods such as bananas and pineapples "swim" along with the more exotic ones--among them, horned melons. Children will have fun using the endpaper produce