Clive Eats Alligators

For breakfast, Frank eats granola, Nicky has a banana, Ernie has porridge, but Clive . . . eats alligators! (Alligator Pops cereal, that is.) As this book unfolds, each of seven children turns out to do something a little differently from the rest. (Frank plays chess with his dog; Celeste has a pet rooster, etc.) Clive Eats Alligators is cute, but might have been more fun if it had been designed as a peek-a-boo book, perhaps geared toward younger readers. Lester underscores her point by making the children representative of different races, but her two nonwhite characters are so lightskinned as to be almost indistinguishable from their Caucasian counterparts. (25)