A Penguin Like Me

“From a distance we all look the same—simply a large group of penguins,” writes Pfister (The Rainbow Fish), referencing a large cast of lightly anthropomorphized characters who inhabit a minimally detailed, blue-white Antarctic landscape. But as the pages introduce various members of the colony by name, readers encounter an assemblage of birds who represent a wide range of personalities and characteristics. Among them, there’s Timmy, who masks a deep inner sadness by being the colony clown; “cheerful and chirpy” Felix, whose “short wings make things more challenging”; detached-seeming Leon, who is actually “very observant and always on the alert”; and Lena, who is “head over heels” in love with Ida. The lack of a narrative arc gives the book a catalog feel, and some character descriptions feel outmoded, but the sympathetic accounting, which eschews employing labels for specific traits (“Sarah loves to draw more than talk. She notices sounds and smells and textures that others miss”), offers a real feel for the penguins’ individual yearnings to both be themselves and belong, and ends on a well-meaning connective phrase: “The main thing is that we’re all penguins. And we belong together.” Ages 4–8. (Mar.)