tupera tupera

I bought this book for my nibling's third birthday. She has recently potty trained and I figured a book with colorful animal illustrations and underpants silliness is developmentally appropriate, and she'll be able to grow into the text itself.

Honestly, I'm pretty fond of the book myself and may buy additional copies for other niblings as they get older. The inclusion of a red die-cut underwear-shaped box for the outside of the book is really clever, though I have no idea how it's going to stand up to toddler/pre-school motor skills.

The illustrations are all collages on brown kraft paper and are very colorful. They're not super inventive - when Polar Bear is looking for his underwear and finds a striped pair, of course they belong to a zebra, and the pair with a cupcake and candy print belongs to a pig - but that doesn't matter so much for little kids. I love that the preview pages for each animal/underpants reveal is a diecut window, encouraging guessing and pattern matching. And, of course, Polar Bear's underpants are white - and he's been wearing them all along, which is another fun element I didn't pick up on until the very end, although in retrospect if I had just looked closely, I would have noticed!

I described the book to my sister-in-law as an underpants-themed "Are you my mother?", and I think that's probably the best summary. But the art is fun and the underpants silliness would appeal to any little kids I've ever known. No wonder it has been translated to so many languages!… (mais)