cover image Bee & Bird

Bee & Bird

Craig Frazier. Roaring Brook/Porter, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-59643-660-2

Frazier's (Lots of Dots) crisp graphic sense and supersaturated fields of red, yellow, green, and light blue drive this wordless picture book. Its focus is the play of view and perspective, using the striped, gossamer-winged Bee and red Bird as subjects. The first spread shows columns of yellow and black%E2%80%94what can they be?%E2%80%94and the next pulls back enough to reveal Bee viewed from above, perched on the gigantic head of Bird; from Bee's point of view, Bird's head is the size of a planet. This book is first cousin to Istvan Banyai's Zoom: it also plays with the idea that something that appears very large (Bird and Bee aboard a sailboat, on what looks like an endless span of stylized waves) turns out to be quite small (it's a toy boat held in the hand of a boy). Here, though, the action takes place on a single stage; Bird and Bee are always there, and the scenery against which they appear is always real. The strong primary colors vibrate against each other, and the patterns have the attractive pull of a billboard. Ages 2%E2%80%936. (May)