One Cherry, One Cheetah
Jackie Morris
Otter-Barry Books

Originally published as a smallish hardback, it’s great to see this available in board book format.

A dozen exquisite watercolour and gold leaf paintings, all except one of wild animals, are to be found in this super-stylish counting book. To start with there is just one cherry – it’s almost begging to be eaten immediately. Turn the page and there are two regal dogs face to face . and ‘two balls, one big, one small.’ Then follow three bears, three bowls, three silver spoons.’ The next spread gets one wondering: why ‘Four fine foxes, sharing strawberries’ but they have only three strawberries.

Next come five elephants, elegant for sure, walking nose to tail but one of the them is sans elegant Indian style regalia. why one wonders. The six cheetahs are clearly having fun playing pat-a-cake, each pair with tails entwined. The seven pandas – giant ones – have ‘pretty painted parasols,’ five of them: two are sharing and another has a fan. (Love the alliteration in that sentence.)

Eight clever otters, two sporting sunhats, juggle with small stones
The nine white mice, so we are told, are ‘happy as can be’ though I have to say that to me at least two look rather downcast as they partake of the tea served with a ladle from a large pot into tiny china teacups..
Then, we have the one cheetah again, only now it has ten cherries. What do you think it will do with those? The final spread reveals all, or rather, a cheetah, thoroughly sated, one imagines, beside a row of …

Make sure to peruse the endpapers, they too are lovely: the front depicts ornately decorated numerals plus the cheetah and a cherry; the final one is a chart of numbers 1 to 10 but there’s no cheetah in sight. Maybe it’s exhausted from orchestrating the numbers at the front.

Every illustration offers both a wealth of aesthetic possibilities and opportunities for speculative and extended talk with a young child.