Clare Beaton’s Animal Rhymes

Beaton adds to her gentle series of nursery-rhyme board books with an attractive collection of seven brief rhymes, carefully illustrated with her signature brand of stitched fabric collages. The rhymes tend toward the gently silly (“Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear./ Fuzzy Fuzzy had no hair”), though Beaton ends on a bedtime-ready note as four gray elephants march across a lightly hilly landscape, with a pale yellow crescent moon illuminating a night scene dotted by trees with blue gingham trunks: “Elephants walking along the trails,/ Are holding hands by holding tails.” Simultaneously available: Clare Beaton’s Garden Rhymes. Up to age 4. (May)