The elephant in the room is often the best-concealed thing. That is certainly the case in the eye-catching New Zealand import Have You Seen Elephant? by debut author-illustrator David Barrow.
Elephant wants to play hide and seek with a boy, who agrees: "OK. You hide." The elephant warns that he is "VERY good." Undaunted, the boy counts to 10 and the search begins, and his little dog joins him. Is Elephant in the kitchen? Yes, but the boy doesn't see him. Elephant has covered himself with the big velvety curtains. Is Elephant in the bedroom? Yes. He's hiding under a big blanket on top of the bed. Amusingly, the dog is much better at sniffing out the elephant than the boy, making the dog worth watching. Preschoolers will be squealing and pointing madly at the elephant (who in truth is not at all hard to spot) while the boy plods from room to room, missing the absurdly camouflaged elephant every time. As the boy heads outside to search, keen observers will spot a tortoise sneaking into the picture as well, cleverly setting up the book's punch line. The endpapers offer a bit of background with a wall of ancestral portraits, including the boy's parents, a biracial couple.
Barrow's watercolor-splashed illustrations are not only entertaining, they are positively edible--deliciously hued and subtly patterned on richly textured paper, and pleasingly rough around the edges. The warm orange-brown colors of the shadowy kitchen look toasted, like crème brûlée, the bedroom like blackberry pie melted with ice cream. A fun, interactive read-aloud that's a feast for the eyes. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness