To Market, To Market: Lap-Sized Board Book - Hardcover

ANNE MIRANDA has written many children’s books, including Night Songs, which she also illustrated, and Glad Monster, Sad Monster: A Book About Feelings. She lives in Madrid, Spain.
JANET STEVENS is the author-illustrator of many books for children, including the Caldecott Honor Book Tops & Bottoms; the Texas Bluebonnet Award winner Cook-a-Doodle-Doo!; and, most recently, The Great Fuzz Frenzy, which she cowrote with her sister, Susan Stevens Crummel. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

A marketing trip from Miranda (Glad Monster, Sad Monster, p. 1309) that jiggity jigs off in time-honored nursery-rhyme fashion, but almost immediately derails into well-charted chaos. The foodstuffs--the fat pig, the red hen, the plump goose, the pea pods, peppers, garlic, and spice--are wholly reasonable in light of the author's mention of shopping at traditional Spanish mercados, which stock live animals and vegetables. Stevens transfers the action to a standard American supermarket and a standard American kitchen, bringing hilarity to scenes that combine acrylics, oil pastels, and colored pencil with photo and fabric collage elements. The result is increasing frazzlement for the shopper, an older woman wearing spectacles, hat, and purple pumps (one of which is consumed by her groceries). It's back to market one last time for ingredients for the hot vegetable soup she prepares for the whole bunch. True, her kitchen's trashed and she probably won't find a welcome mat at her supermarket hereafter, but all's well that ends well--at least while the soup's on. (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.