Ten Little Owls

Deceptively simple, this board book offers many opportunities to explore counting, rhyming, and vocabulary. Though most of the animals—such as mice, bats, and owls—are familiar in North America, others—such as quolls, devils, and dingoes—may be less familiar to readers unacquainted with the fauna of Australia. The creatures enjoy the night in their own unique manners, presented in rhyming text that stretches across the pages and highlights the action verbs in colored and enlarged text: “5 little gliders / sip nectar from a tree. // 6 little fur seals / swim in the sea.”

On the face of it, a simple enough introduction to counting and Australian animals which is given extra layers of fun and learning by little things, like pairing the text of consecutive pages into rhyming couplets, so that there is that subtle addition of anticipation when a page is turned and the word that will complete the rhyming pair is discovered.

While the words are very simple (as they should be), it’s the illustrations that make this book special. Treml’s detailed drawings are sublime, and I have found myself leafing through this book just to gaze at them on more than one occasion.

Writing in rhymes that never hit a false note, Treml provides a lilting introduction to Australian wildlife in this counting board book that begins as “1 little wombat wake from his rest” and concludes with him returning to bed several pages later.