cover image Dancing Feet

Dancing Feet

Charlotte Agell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $13.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-15-200444-6

With roughly executed watercolors and a light rhyming ditty, Agell aims to celebrate ethnic differences and similarities: ``People young and old / doing what they do, / living in the world, / and one of them is you!'' While the text emphasizes what people have in common (``Eyes, eyes / looking left and right, / crying tears sometimes / resting through the night''), the illustrations feature various multiethnic, multiracial crews. Sometimes Agell groups together people of different colors, sometimes she focuses on her subjects' clothing (one composition shows two figures from the waist down; the first is clad in pantaloons fringed gaucho-style, the second wears an Asian-type robe and thongs). The illustrations themselves are uneven, ranging from the suggestively simple to the excessively cartoonish; however, they convey the energy implicit in the text. Ages 3-7. (Apr.)