Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals. The sturdy binding and exceptionally thick pages make this and its companion acceptable choices where board books get heavy use. The claim on the back cover that “sparkly patterns stimulate baby's vision” may sell books to eager young parents but is not backed up by scientific research.

Foil stripes on the covers and sparkly textures inside seem designed to make this Baby Sparkle series stand out on the shelf, but these decorative features have no relationship to the content of each title. The rhymes in Baby Night-night, published simultaneously, work somewhat better, though rhyming “ting-a-ling” with “begin” is a stretch.

Saying simply, “Make a smiley, happy face,” “Make a sad and gloomy face,” and so on would have avoided this problem while keeping the text age appropriate, giving it a genuine feel, and avoiding the singsong tone. “Be really grumpy with me!” concludes the rhyme begun on the previous spread with “Hee! Hee! Hee!” Moreover, that “Be really grumpy with me!” paired with a picture of a distraught, crying child seems rather mean-spirited. The text is wordy to accommodate the awkwardly forced rhymes that stretch over two double-page spreads. Hee! Hee! Hee!” The first, smiling baby has curly brown hair and light-brown skin, but the other five in this brief album are light-skinned, albeit charming.

The text takes the form of prompts, as if from a photographer in a studio. A sturdy, serviceable board book features babies doing what babies do best-look cute.

Baby Faces by Dawn Sirett