Read, Read, Read, said the Baby: Jamberry by Bruce Degen

I'm going back to a beloved childhood classic today, with Jamberry. Originally published in 1983 as a picture book, the first board book edition was created in 1995 and it has been continuously in print since then.

Degen's cheerful pictures show a white boy with striped blue shirt, brown trousers, and suspenders, his reddish-brown hair sticking out every which way, cavorting through the pages. The boy is accompanied by a friendly brown bear, sporting a stylish purple top hat. There's no particular plot, just explosions of berries everywhere! The endpages start with the barefoot boy, wandering among the berry bushes and sampling sweet treats. He encounters the bear in a canoe, hat full of berries, and the two set off together.

They travel past marshmallow meadows, encounter frolicking ponies and lambs with baskets of strawberries, cart off a trainful of blackberries, and float into the sky in a balloon that's a giant pink berry, with explosions of berries all around them, ending in a flood of berries and sweet stickiness.

The text is so much fun to read-aloud and repeat - who can ever forget, "Quickberry! Quackberry! Pick me a blackberry!" It's a tongue-twister of berries as the rhymes bounce along each page and become sillier and sillier, "Moonberry, starberry cloudberry sky/Boomberry zoomberry rockets shoot by."

Verdict: The book is still available as a hardcover picture book, as well as a board book, and I think the original version shows off the art better. In the board book it's a little squashed and fuzzy, and it's hard to pick out all the details. However, any way you can get it this is a sweet, berry-licious story that's a must-have for most library collections.

ISBN: 9780062643797; This edition published 2017 by HarperFestival; Two copies (board book) owned by the library