One More Try
Naomi Jones and James Jones
Oxford Children’s Books

Mightily impressed with the tall tower the squares and hexagons are building during a play session, that Circle invites triangle and diamond friends to co-construct a tower of their own. They soon discover that easy as edifice erecting might appear, it’s nothing of the sort; indeed it’s fraught with problems of the balancing kind.

However circle, diamond and triangle aren’t giving up that easily; they decide to undertake a training regime to build up their strength. Now although this additional strength helps a bit, a tumbling tower soon results. Perseverance is the name of the game where Circle is concerned, so can a bit of studying improve things? It does, but the tower still wobbles much more than that of the squares and hexagons.

Down but definitely not out, Circle takes time out to give himself a new angle on the challenge.

While so doing, he receives a message from above and although it takes a bit of re-enthusing all the others, they agree to give it one final try working with Circle’s plan. Will success be the reward for refusing to abandon their aim?

In a manner similar to The Perfect Fit, the Jones partnership cleverly combine themes of problem-solving, determination, imagination and mental toughness with mathematical concepts relating to shape. Naomi’s amusing narrative with its plethora of speech bubbles, mainly of the uplifting kind, together with James’s shape characters that while appearing two-dimensional on the page, prove themselves to be anything but, work in perfect harmony: it can’t be easy to give simple shapes personalities but this illustrator has certainly found a way.