In mid-to-late January, S started to get particularly into bunny rabbits. At the same time, S began to gravitate towards Laura Sassi and Farah Shah’s Pumpkin Day for Boo and Belle. This isn’t surprising — the book is adorable and prominently features a bunny as the main character.

What surprised me a bit was the depth of S’s interest in the book. It’s not just any book; it’s “my” book. As in, the book gets thrust toward me with the instruction to “read MY book.”

The book is very long for S’s normal attention span (561 words), but we can often get through the full text because the sentences are short and bouncy and there’s lots going on on each page.

For the most part, though, S actually “reads” the book without me by picking it up and flipping through the pages. This is a testament both to Shah’s colorful, inviting illustrations (and the volume of fun things to spot in them), and to Sassi’s writing creating the opportunity for new and exciting illustrations on each page.

Since the illustrations seem to drive S’s interest in the book, I thought it would be interesting to highlight a few images and point out what captures S’s attention in them.

This is probably one of S’s favorite images in the book. We’ve got (1) a bunny (2) wearing a bow (3) setting out cakes. And in the background, there are pumpkins, flowers, a ladybug vacuum that S loves to point out (“ladybug!”), and a clock on the wall that S also loves (“clock!”).

Here, S is interested in umbrellas and raincoats. (And probably also the bunny.) The movement in the illustrations across multiple images also doesn’t hurt.

And here, the big winner is the bird essentially playing hide and seek in the window. (And probably also the bunny.)

TL;DR: Having lots of things to point out in the background adds to the number of possible toddler hooks and helps build vocabulary. It turns an already-fun book into an outright winner. Also, one can never go wrong with bunnies.

Pumpkin Day for Boo and Belle By the Numbers

Pages: 30 pages of what I would consider the “main” book

Word Count: 561

Words Per Illustration: 18.1

Words Per Sentence: 5.39*

*Since the book rhymes, it creates natural pauses that make it easier for S to pay attention to longer sentences. I therefore counted clauses as full sentences where they conveyed a full idea that S could understand (i.e., where they would likely have ended with a period rather than a comma if the book were written in prose). That occurred in about half of the rhyming sentences.