A busy mother hen makes the titular plea to her family in this funny debut about teamwork. After yet another
week of running out of groceries and household items despite trips to the store—“We had pancakes, but no syrup.... We had cookies, no milk”—Mom flips out. So when she serves up a desperation dinner of “peanut butter and pickled grub on macaroni casserole” it's sufficient motivation to get Papa and the peeps to finally fall in line, helping with list-making and shopping. Plenty of families will see themselves in Darbyshire's universal and humorous situations, and the minimal yet sometimes dramatic text will have great appeal for preschoolers. (“It was... boo-boo, no Band-Aid... wet baby, no diaper... macaroni, no cheese... peanut butter, no jelly. I don't even want to talk about the toilet paper.”) Darbyshire uses bold blocks of color as background and a smudgy black outline for figures and objects. Her gentle anthropomorphizing of her chickens makes their oval heads, dot eyes and triangular orange beaks especially expressive—a feat to cluck about. Ages 3–5. (Apr.)
