Boom Bah! (Phil Cummings, illus. Nina Rycroft, Working Title Press, $19.95 hb, ISBN 9781876288907, June) *****

What fun readers young and old are going to have with this rhythmic book that is an encouragement to make lots of noise. Boom Bah! will brighten the listless time after an afternoon nap but is not at all
suitable for bedtime! What begins in the kitchen with a ‘ting’ on a teacup builds to a symphony that is a celebratory union between animals with home-made instruments and a ‘real’ brass band led by a baton-waving horse. You can see the dramatic possibilities of this cumulative tale. It is the second book and production (the first was the equally brilliant Cat by Mike Dumbleton and Craig Smith) developed through Picture Book to Performance, a literacy initiative of Windmill Performing Arts and the Advertiser Little Big Book Club. Most of the text consists of sounds, as the title suggests, and along with marching and improvised music-making there is an introduction to concepts of position, size and number. The play will be touring Australia this year. Rycroft’s watercolour illustrations, the best she has published to date, walk a line between nurseryland beauty and fun park hilarity. Great value in every way for preschools and homes with toddlers.

Kerry White is a bibliographer and a major contributor to The Source, an online resource

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

Tags: phil cummings