Who says an obsession with ice cream can't be good for you? The red baseball–capped boy hero of this irresistible picture book follows his passion into historical research, math story problems, cartography and more.
Peter Sís (Madlenka) frames the story as a letter from the boy to his grandpa, describing his "delicious summer." In the boy's bedroom, festooned with dessert-accented shapes, a teddy bear plays a cone-shaped guitar, wall and desk lamps look like ice cream cones, even birds come in winged cone shapes. At the beach, cone-shaped planes fly "ice cream" banners and ships bear cone-shaped smoke stacks. Ice cream flavors expand the boy's vocabulary: "I am conquering big words like tornado and explosion," he writes, in reference to "cherry tornado" and "mango explosion." With the encyclopedias Grandpa gave him, the narrator is "diving into world history." He traces the first ice cream back to ancient China 2,000 years ago (made of snow, milk, rice and fruit). Marco Polo carries the recipe along the Silk Road from China to Italy, bringing ice cream to Europe; Quakers get credit for carrying it from Europe to America. Sís depicts its embrace by three presidents--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison--on the sails of a three-masted schooner ("The Founding Fathers and I have a lot in common!" the boy writes to his grandfather).
Sís fills his text with fun puns ("I always take a break on sundaes") and his pages with ice cream–tinted watercolors, outlined in chocolate sprinkles. Delicious indeed. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness