Readers of Shawn Harris's Caldecott Honor-winning Have You Ever Seen a Flower? have every reason to hope for another effervescent, imagination-stoking fantasia, and that's precisely what they get with Let's Be Bees, a picture book full of noises that isn't really a book about noises.
Let's Be Bees begins with an adult reading to a long-haired child. "Let's be bees," says the text of the picture book in the caretaker's hand. (The book is called, that's right, Let's Be Bees, and it has Harris's book's cover.) Obligingly, the grown-up says to the kid, "Let's buzz," and they do ("Buzz!"), becoming bees who fly out of the collars of their shirts. When the book within Harris's book says "Let's be birds," the adult is back in human clothing but with a bird's head and wings, and again the grown-up obliges--"Let's chirp"--and off they fly ("Chirp!"). On it goes, with the book's ever-morphing duo carrying out increasingly challenging imperatives: "Let's be lofty, leafy trees," "Let's be snow," and more.
Let's Be Bees features bold and chunky illustrations that Harris (illustrator of the Newbery Medal-winning The Eyes and the Impossible) created with crayons, and the fuzzy outlines seem to invite the physical adaptations that the text requests. The book may well provoke noisemaking from the littlest readers to match the adult's and child's efforts, and when the caretaker finally pulls everything together and says, "Let's make every sound," it's not hard to imagine readers of all ages letting it rip. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author