Anna suggests to her friend Crocodile that they go find gold. " 'That would be dangerous and difficult,' said Crocodile." That clinches the deal for Anna.
Crocodile and Anna have been friends for a long time, it seems, because their banter is warm, funny and cozy-familiar. They have secret faces. Each tries to guess what the other one is thinking. At the moment, it's not hard for Crocodile to guess, because all Anna is thinking about is gold. Pragmatic Crocodile points out that gold is always either buried or sunken. He draws "the whole world," and Anna adds the "X" essential to any good buried-gold treasure map. Then, to illustrate the sunken-gold possibility, Crocodile sketches a ship, a sea monster and a hidden mountain. So of course fearless Anna gets a boat and they go out to sea. Two wordless, dreamy, deep-blue undersea double-page spreads show Anna and Crocodile swimming with schools of fish, luminous orbs and giant tentacled creatures just above a shipwreck... and a hilariously odd cache of gold that includes gold lions and gold hairbrushes. Gold! They decide to bury it on an island for safekeeping, then they sail home, their secret faces now happy faces.
How to Find Gold is a treasure. Brown-skinned Anna and green-skinned Crocodile could not be any cuter--and the two are dropped into wonderfully rough pencil, crayon and watercolor backdrops, often quite scribbly and slightly unfinished for effect, but gorgeous, splendidly colorful and bursting with life. German-born, London-dwelling Viviane Schwarz (There Are Cats in This Book) takes a flight of fancy and soars. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness