In this joyful picture book, Amy Schwartz (The Purple Coat) introduces a smile-inducing rhyming list of 100 favorite things and a diverse cast of children to demonstrate them.
She opens with a pairing of indoor/outdoor images. On the left, three children model "red socks," another child engages with "building blocks," and a redheaded girl holds a mixing bowl, "licking the spoon" as her puppy watches hopefully; a nighttime image that takes up two-thirds of the right-hand page depicts "the man in the moon" (smiling, naturally), while a blonde girl and her dog gaze skyward, and, below, one child models "an orange hat" and another holds "an orange cat." The swooping type in orange connects these latter two images, just as the other rhyming couplets appear in matching type, color and font. Schwartz's array of patterns and colors will hold children's interest and move their eyes down the page. The yellow polka-dot sheets on a "cozy bed," for instance, draw out the slice of "raisin bread" a child is holding in the next vignette. One of the standout double-page spreads pairs a full-page image of "city lights" as a child drifts off to sleep with an urban skyline outside the window, while opposite, a father and child camp on a hilltop under "starry nights."
Unlike Schwartz's What James Likes Best, readers do not follow the same characters through their day. Instead, the book's ingenious design and rhymes lead them through the pages, and it's guaranteed to spark children's own lists of happy things. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness