Our Friend Moon

Redmond takes readers through the moon’s phases in this spare novelty board book, first in the Full Circle Books series, whose semicircle shape opens to reveal its round, cratered subject. Beginning with a situating line atop an image of the bright full moon—“The moon is a small hello in the sky”—simple rhyming phrases take readers, one page at a time, through the orb’s waning stages. The appearance of a shadowed new moon at the book’s midway point offers a heartening line (“But our friend is never gone for long”) and ushers in a new rhyme scheme that continues through subsequent waxing spreads until “The moon returns./ Here all along.” Circling from introduction to valediction to glad reunion, it’s a straightforwardly reassuring look at cycles that’s just right for bedtime viewing. An end page labels the moon’s phases as viewed from the Earth’s northern hemisphere. Ages up to 3. (Nov.)