Dear Duck, Please Come!

Even good friends can have episodes of miscommunication: here, the trouble starts with semantic ambiguity. “Dear Duck, please come! I lost my tooth,” reads the letter from Rabbit that Duck receives at his egg-shaped home. Thinking Rabbit needs help, Duck immediately launches a search, and is joined by Badger and Turtle because, as Mackenzie (Because Barbara) writes in what becomes the book’s refrain, it’s “a good-friend thing to do.” The extensive forest quest allows Santoso (Dear Unicorn), whose digital drawings resemble velvety oil pastels, to add moments of sly visual humor, as when an already-off-the-page Badger returns to give slow-moving turtle a lift. The compositions also leverage the landscape in a variety of playful ways, including a vertical orientation that depicts the party scaling a tall tree. Yet the tooth remains missing even when Squirrel and Mouse join the crew, and the group reaches Rabbit’s carrot-shaped home in tears, sure they have let their pal down. The end reveals that the request actually centered on help celebrating a dental milestone— an invitation that the friends embrace with relief and joy. Being of assistance can mean so much in any relationship; the key, the creators comically emphasize, is offering the right kind of help. Ages 2–6. (Jan.)