Brown makes her debut with a variation of Are You My Mother?, but her newly hatched crocodile protagonist finds the world to be a considerably more benevolent place than did P.D. Eastman's baby bird. In fact, the penultimate animal he encounters, a zebra, offers not only words of comfort but also a piggyback ride to the river, where the crocodile reunites with his mother: "Where have you been?" she asks, "Oh, just making friends," replies her son. The slackness of the narrative places the burden of the storytelling on Brown's visuals; fortunately, she is up to the challenge. Her chunky, naïf-styled animals look like they've been assembled from a toy-box of geometric shapes, and they invite the reader into the pages with their free-wheeling body language: a blue monkey hangs from tendril-like limbs, a plump tiger lolls in the sun. And even though Brown's crocodile is, by comparison, an essentially static, reactive figure, she gets plenty of comic mileage out of his bright, open eyes—and his striking resemblance to a serrated slice of honeydew melon. Ages 3-7. (Mar.)
