Small Readers: Duck and Cat's Rainy Day by Carin Bramson

This is a spin-off of an earlier picture book, Hey, Duck! which I didn't really care for, but I ended up liking the easy reader more.

Duck, a soft-colored fluffy yellow, is out on a walk with Cat, whose white fur is set off by a striped tail, brown and black ears and eye circles, and a few brown spots. Cat is, naturally, unhappy when it starts raining, but Duck's silly antics cheer her up and soon they are having a good time.

Although I found the illustrations in the original book to be blurry and indistinct, I thought these were a little clearer and the soft colors were set off by the crystal rain drops and sprinkling of flowers. The text is still rhyming, but just in short, choppy sentences. "Cat wears a frown./Her head hangs down."

One thing this book definitely demonstrates is the confusion of reading levels. The publisher says they use "F&P Text Level Gradient," which few parents are going to know is Fountas and Pinnell, or exactly what that means. They mark it a Level 1, "Ready to Read" for preschool through kindergarten. Our local schools use a mixture of F&P and lexiles, with Scholastic Reading Counts in the upper elementary grades. A former staff member made an equivalent chart, which we use to sticker all our easy readers from black (easiest) on up. Looking up the lexile of this book, it comes in at 250, which is at the upper end of the titles we sticker as red (F&P D-H, lexile 100-275). And then we mistakenly put a green sticker on this one anyways which I need to fix... It's a little more complex to read than it looks, although it has just a few words on each page, some of those words are tricky ones.

Verdict: A nice filler for lower reading levels and a good choice if you need additional titles at this level for your easy reader collection.

ISBN: 9781524771720; Published March 2020 by Random House; Purchased for the library