One Boy

by Laura Vaccaro Seeger


On its surface, it is a one-to-ten counting book, illustrated with bright, simple pictures in saturated colors and heavy black outlines. Precise die cuts in every other page add another level of sophistication. On a two-page spread, text on the left identifies what’s to be counted—“THREE APES,” for example— while a die cut in the right-hand page exposes a picture of the subject through the hole. Turn the page, and the die cut frames a piece of the text from the previous spread, incorporating it into a new phrase that spells out a new situation—“BIG ESCAPE”—that is illustrated on the opposite page. And if that weren’t enough, the final spread links the entire book together with a string of consecutive images that is delightfully surprising.

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