Roseanne Thong, illustrated by Grace Lim,
Round is a Mooncake: A Book of Shapes.
Chronicle Books, 2000

Huy Voun Lee, illustrated by Huy Voun Lee,
1,2,3, Go!
Henry Holt and Company, 2000

Childhood grants the young girl or boy new eyes. The world dazzles and is dazzling. The ordinary takes on luminous qualities. Colors are on fire. Shapes and sizes know no boundaries. These rich, fresh images as seen only by a child's unblinking eyes are captured in Round is a Mooncake: A Book of Shapes.

There are far too many books which attempt to teach the young reader how to count, identify the alphabet, or recognize shapes. Often, the objects to be numbered or named are lifelessly scattered across the page, fixed upon a sterile white background. But in this wonderful rendition of the way things fall into shape, both the author and illustrator succeed in portraying not only the beauty of shapes in everyday objects but also the depth's of one's culture, the love of family, and the bonds of a tight-knit community. Neighbors play checkers and watch puppet shows together, a family enjoys a meal of pizza and dim sum, a local storekeeper 'rings' up the bill with an abacus. Here, round is not presented as the too predictable wheel or coin. Round is a mooncake and the glowing moon as well as the many, many little moons of paper lanterns lighting up the neighborhood. A rectangle can be as traditional as an inking stone or as modern as a mobile phone. These examples show how carefully author and illustrator worked together in order to come up with such unique ways transforming the everyday stuff around us into treasures. Just a minor quibble: after paying careful attention to small details such as the pattern of fabrics and wallpaper, a more judicious editing job would have helped - 'a bowl of goldfish that make no sound' clearly was not intended to be a pun on fractured English.

Huy Voun Lee's 1,2,3, Go! is likewise commendable especially since it does a marvelous job of teaching so many lessons in one very slim volume: the young reader learns not only how to count, he or she finds out how to write in Chinese characters. Lee's cut-paper collage technique turns the illustrations into vibrant, active pictures in which the children being depicted are literally leaping out of the page and having the time of their lives be it in playing drums or rolling snowballs. This is what counting books were meant to be: simple, effective, and fun.

Fatima Lim-Wilson