Book Title: Now You See Me, Now You Don’t (available here)
Author: Patricia Hegarty
Illustrator: Jonny Lambert
Publisher: Little Tiger Press
Publication Date: Oct 2020
Most Suitable For: EYFS and KS1
Reviewed By: @123_Mr_D
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t is a rhyming tale about a chameleon that loves using its camouflage to play tricks on others. An orangutan has its banana stolen, a sloth is tickled out of its tree and mischief and mayhem generally ensues until one prank goes too far. A tree frog with similar abilities decides, rather than teaming up with chameleon, to teach it an important lesson about respect. This is a sort of fable that concludes that the odd little, harmless prank can be fun but it can become bad habit. Chameleon sees the errors of its ways in the end and order is restored to the jungle.
It is an “irreverent rhyming romp”, as the blurb says, and also includes some rich vocabulary to discuss such as ‘invincible’ and ‘lurch’. I could imagine parts of this to be a fun to act out with children, for example when a toucan has its tail feather pinched from its bottom! Children will also enjoy searching the pages for the camouflaged chameleon and the frog.
There is a real vibrancy to the artwork which fits the jungle setting and it is reminiscent of Eric Carle. Jonny Lambert has layered up a good level of detail and I like how the arrangement of the text has been placed around the illustrations with parts turned into speech bubbles.
This book would go down well at school in early years and KS1.
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You can order Now You See Me Now You Don’t online or from your local bookshop.
Many thanks to the publisher for sending us a review copy of this book and to our Review Panel member for reviewing it.
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