Find Anthony Ant

The Grahams employ the school bus ditty "The Ants Go Marching One by One," to exhort readers into a scavenger hunt of sorts: they must spot a cute ant named Anthony amid the hubbub of an anthill. Each spread offers three clues to the hero's whereabouts, as in this passage: "The ants came marching four by four. Anthony stopped... To knock on the door? To ask for more? To sweep the floor?" (The number of ants numerated by the song has little to do with the search itself, except to provide a catchy meter and rhyme.) Readers will still need to look closely to distinguish Anthony from the six-legged red herrings: many share at least one characteristic with the hero. Some ants sport red caps, some lug red backpacks, but only Anthony wears both—and all of them are as small as, well, ants. The real fun of the book is in savoring Graham Philpot's cutaway views of an expansive underground kingdom. He imagines each spread as a distinctively themed maze (one is defined by battlefield references, another by what appears to be a dinosaur skeleton). His drawings of non-ant creatures (a frog, a snail, a family of elves living under a toadstool) possess a Victorian sense of elegance without being stuffy. The artist has a penchant for cheeky detail, and readers may well giggle over the sight of ants building with Legos or reading the newspaper while perched on a toilet. Ages 3-6. (Apr.)