These are both new titles from Walker Books: thank you to the publishers for sending them for review.

Taxi, Go!
Patricia Toht and Maria Karipidou

Courtesy of Patricia Toot’s rhyming text and Maria Karipidou’s vibrant illustrations, we join a smiley red taxi for a busy working day in town, driving through all kinds of weather, as it stops to pick up fare-paying passengers – in turn a business woman, shoppers and children going to play football, a couple going to a dance,

theatre visitors and finally our busy cab heads for the airport to collect a family returning from their travels abroad. With them safely home, it’s back to the depot for a well-deserved night’s rest.

There is so much to see in the child-friendly scenes, you will likely need to share this several times to allow your young audience to enjoy the action and linger over all the details including the town’s diverse residents.

Parents/carers might choose to read this at bedtime to encourage their little one(s) to join Taxi as it dims the light and slips off into the land of slumbers.

Oops! Rabbit
Jo Ham

This is another striking succession of playful misadventures in the life of Jo Ham’s silhouette leporine character. Herein, Rabbit wields a paintbrush creating a mural until ‘Oops!’ the chair Rabbit is standing on topples and it’s then ‘Rabbit off’ and paint splashing all around. A large wave destroys the sandcastle in the second misadventure. Then comes bath-time with further mishaps due to an excess of bubblebath and finally, tempted by the sight of a cake atop the table, Rabbit finds a creative use for an umbrella.
Small humans will enjoy following the four sequences and joining in with the repeated, ‘Rabbit on … Oops! … Rabbit off’ text.