Show your colors; Name your numbers by Smriti Prasadam-Halls and Edward Underwood

These are categorized as board books with a "pop-up surprise" but I consider them more on the side of pop-up or novelty books.

Name your numbers has a vivid pink cover with a white goose and the numbers 1-10 faintly showing in the background. Each spread features a different animal on a simple background with a few bright colored details and a rhyming couplet. The text "Let's count your claws,/Koala Clive./On each paw,/I've got five!" features a smiling gray koala in a brown tree surrounded by leaves. A bright red bird looks sideways at Clive and a bold 5 in black typeface stands out in the right bottom corner. The whole image is set against two shades of green for a background. After reaching ten feathers on a goose, the last two spreads invite the reader to count a crocodile's teeth. The final spread has a pop-out of a grinning crocodile mouth with rows of curved white teeth and a warning to "BEWARE!"

The companion book, Show your colors has a similar set-up but features colors instead of numbers. Readers are invited to admire the strong white teeth of "Donkey Dwight" the sparkling green eyes of "Shark Shaheen" and more. The second to last page invites Spider Jack to show his hairy black legs, and the pop-up consists of a menacing spider with four sharp fangs and wiggly legs glaring at the reader, accompanied by "so run away QUICK,/and don't come back!"

Of course, one can't really expect biological accuracy from a board book, but some of the featured animals are a bit out there. Sharks, as far as I know, do not have sparkling emerald eyes and I can't think of an equine I've ever seen with bleached white teeth. Most of the counting book is more accurate, although a goose has a lot more than ten feathers and a porcupine more than nine quills! I also strongly disapprove of the "nasty spider" stereotype - there's no reason to teach kids that spiders are scary and bad, even if you live somewhere with a lot of venomous types. Of course, that's just one of my personal pet peeves, most people won't care if you vilify INNOCENT AND BENEFICIAL arachnids. Ahem.

The actual issue with these books is that, although they're listed as board books they are very flimsy. Besides the pop-up surprise at the back of each book, the pages are a thin cardboard, not the sturdy pages of a regular board book. The crocodile pop-up (she has 26 teeth by the way) is pretty simple, but poor Spider Jack has several moving parts, including sets of four legs that "wiggle" back and forth, so these are unlikely to survive long in a typical board book section.

Verdict: I would categorize these as novelties that might make a good addition to a kit or pop-up book collection, or possibly as a gift for a careful child. They aren't much more expensive than the average board book, so a perfectly reasonable addition if you're willing to add more ephemeral materials and/or have a lot of requests for pop-ups.

Name your numbers
ISBN: 9781536228458

Show your colors
ISBN: 9781536228465

Published July 2023 by Candlewick; Review copies provided by publisher; Donated to the library.