The Quiet Boat Ride
Chocolate Cake
The Sunrise

Patient, reasonable Fox and excitable, imaginative Chick make a great duo. There are 1-4 panels per page, occasionally a double-page spread with a white border. The pen, ink, and watercolor illustrations have a soft pastel palette, deepening to scarlet on the page spread with the sunset.

See also: Charlie & Mouse by Laurel Snyder and Emily Hughes, Frog & Toad by Arnold Lobel, the Bear & Mouse books by Bonnie Becker ( )

Fox and Chick are friends who are rather different -- Fox is serious and practical while Chick is emotional and imaginative. But they always end up enjoying their time together no matter what.

This story of friendship is lovely, peppered with humor and heart. The book consists of three chapters/stories. In the first, Fox is planning on a quiet boat ride alone when Chick decides to tag along and imagines increasingly worse fates for them out on the water. The middle story is about an unexpected gift Chick gets which sets them at unease until Fox reassures them everything will be okay. Finally, Fox wakes up early to see the sunrise but is derailed when Chick wants to accompany but cannot get ready fast enough.

I love that Chick provides plenty of humor to Fox's 'straight man' routine, but the comedy is never poking fun at Chick per se. Their friendship is always the key takeaway. The language used is relatively simple and direct, which makes this book a good choice for beginning readers. The inclusion of chapters/stories makes for easy places to take a break and/or for a child to feel truly accomplished when reaching the end of the whole book.

The illustrations are gentle watercolors with a somewhat muted palette, although they are still colorful. (I'm not sure how to describe that better; colors are used but they aren't particularly super bold.) Fox and Chick express a number of emotions through facial expressions and other nonverbal cues, making the illustrations a nice complement to the text. The overall style evokes that of a comic book, with panels and conversation bubbles.

The gender of either character is not specified, which I guess is better than automatically labelling them both as male. However, I think most readers have been conditioned to assume male if not told otherwise. And, since we're dealing only with animal characters, there is no diversity to speak of with this title. ( )

delightful!! ( )