On the Farm

January 1, 2019
In rhyming verse, explore a farm alongside an enthusiastic toddler.This tame board book features a toddler and their (extremely youthful) mother admiring scarecrows, playing with ducklings, and spotting various animals and machinery about the farmyard. Books about a day on the farm are an oft-repeated theme for the board-book crew, and there's no new ground broken here. Digitally rendered, the loose-lined humans and animals have a breezy, caricaturelike style, but they aren't imbued with much charm. Stick-figure animals populate the backgrounds, and even animals like baby lambs that should be objectively adorable instead resemble shapeless scribbles. While there are scattered perky pages with contrast and color--a page of bright red apples opposite another of golden honey--a vanilla palette of listless, desaturated colors daubed in patches against stark white pages dominates, making this one bland barnyard. Its narrative has an equally dull sound. Ho-hum rhyming reports what mom and baby spot in an overly singsong rhythm that doesn't flow effortlessly when read aloud: "You see corn in a row / I see a big scarecrow." Mom and toddler both present white.It's docile and harmless, but there are already better barnyard-themed books available to choose. (Board book. 1-3)

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