The Numbers Dance: A Counting Comedy - Softcover

Josephine Nobisso is the award-winning author of more than 20 children's books, including In English, of Course, Show; Don't Tell!, and The Weight of Mass, which were selected as American Bookseller Association Book Sense 76 Picks. She lives in Westhampton Beach, New York. Dasha Ziborova is the illustrator of Crispin the Terrible and In English, of Course. She is a website and children's computer games designer and a big-scale mural painter. She lives in New York City.

PreSchool-Grade 4–A counting book that doesn't measure up. And-a-1 And-a-2 And-a-3 And-a-4, Four dainty numbers waltz across the floor. As the numerals dance, the verses sketch the chaos that results from 5 and 6 (rumba and samba dancers) attempting to share the floor, followed by 7 through 10, who are enjoying country line dancing. The numbers, each of a slightly different design and color, border the right side of the spreads in small squares and tumble over the dance floor in larger form, colliding with each other. They try out one another's steps as order is restored and then they all go back to their own styles less boisterously. The verse does not flow naturally in structure or in rhythm, with yahoo made to rhyme with lasso and questionable words such as crumped and rump used to fit the rhyme scheme. In one place, the couplets become triplets. The digital illustrations, rendered from mixed media, have the look of minimalist collages, with largely white pages where the numbers, occasionally embellished by a prop, are cavorting. For a few pages, a background with wallpaper design is used. The general effect is not particularly appealing. The dance-floor milieu is unlikely to draw a preschool or primary-grade audience, and the book doesn't work as an exercise in artistic design for older children.–Judith Constantinides, formerly at East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library, LA
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