Ten Friends - Hardcover

Bruce Goldstone has worked in educational publishing for nearly twenty years. He lives and works in New York City. His first book, The Beastly Feast (illustrated by Blair Lent), won a Parent's Choice Silver Honor.

Heather Cahoon makes her debut on the Holt list with Ten Friends. She is also the author and illustrator of Word Play ABC. She lives and works in Montgomery, NY.

"If you could ask 10 friends to tea, tell me who your friends would be," begins Goldstone's (The Beastly Feast) rollicking, rhyming approach to addition and multiplication. In each of 10 spreads, the unseen narrator suggests different combinations that add up to 10, which Cahoon (Word Play ABC) interprets in vibrantly saturated spreads of an anthropomorphized menagerie. A rose-hued stage scene featuring a sextet of flamingos en pointe, partnered with four leaping frogs, for instance, illustrates the equation 6 + 4; while 8 + 2 translates into eight mouse tailors cavorting among spools and thread, joined by two plunger-toting elephant plumbers. Whenever the equations lengthen beyond two addends, the rhyming text takes on jovial patter-song silliness: "How about 1 prince, 1 painter, and 2 potters, 1 diner, 1 miner, 1 major, and 3 otters?" Finally, the book offers up the cumulative possibility of what would happen "if ALL your friends show up": it's the number 100, the magnitude of which is driven home by a page filled with thumbnail portraits of every one of the participants. Exuberantly stylish, this painless introduction to the power of 10 should prove to be many aspiring mathematicians' cup of tea. Ages 3-7. (Aug.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.