There's something new under the sun: Sun Flower Lion is a fresh spin on the traditional cumulative tale. Not only does it depart from the breakneck pacing and seemingly endless unspooling characteristic of "This Is the House That Jack Built" and its kind, in Kevin Henkes's book, imagination, not action, fuels the narrative.
"This is the sun," Henkes begins, "Can you see it?" This introduces a white circle rimmed with lacelike yellow trim. Throughout the book's six whisper-short chapters, this simple image--it conjures a color-reversed fried egg--keeps changing its look and, hence, identity. For starters: to illustrate "This is a flower. Can you see it?" chapter one's sun has grown a stem and two leaves. And, hey, what's this? "It looks like a little lion." Later in the book, the lion sleeps: "He dreams he is in a field of flowers.... The flowers are cookies."
For the book's art, Henkes sticks with yellows, grays and black and white, which serve his mission: to spur toddlers to look for similarities among images. The book concludes with a cozy, applause-worthy curtain call for its featured players: the sun and a flower flank a lion family that includes the little cub, whose tail tuft will remind keen-eyed readers of... something. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author