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Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow?
By Susan A. Shea
Illustrated by Tom Slaughter
Blue Apple Books
$16.99
ISBN: 978-1-60905-062-7
Ages 4-8
On shelves now

Because I’m a librarian I like to slot books into distinct categories. Alphabet book. Concept book. Emotions book. So on. Other people like it too. That’s why I keep a file of different lists of books by topic at my reference desk. There are some books that don’t fit into any category, and that’s fine. They’re cool. They prove that the publishing industry today allows for creativity. Then there’s a third category; books that belong to categories where they are the sole occupants. Meet Do You Know Which Ones Will Grow by Susan Shea. If I were going to label its category it would be “Interactive picture books that set up false pretenses so that kids can knock `em down”. That’s a lot of words, but that’s okay. I like books that make you work a bit, and the delight of this title is that aside from the great art, it’s an original and fun premise. The lift-the-flap meets the concept book.

“If you look around you’ll see, / Some things grow like you and me.” Kids know that they’re growing but what else does so? With rhyming text Susan Shea asks kids if one thing grows, will another? For example, “If a cub grows and becomes a bear can a stool grow and become . . .” Lift the flap and the stool elongates as the text finishes with “a chair?”. Time and again living things are paired with inanimate and the readers are asked if they will grow. Finally at the end of the book all is made clear (“Yes to cows. Yes to snakes. No to plows. No to cakes.”) With great panache the book is an entirely new look at growing things and what it means to be more than just big.

We generally associate lift-the-flap books with the very youngest of cogent readers. When I do a toddler storytime, I like to include one lift-the-flap book, partly because there’s no replicating the look of sheer surprise on a kid’s face when they see a page shift and change. I get a kick out of that. Yet there’s nothing saying that the magic of lift-the-flap leaves a kid when they enter preschool and beyond. The act of reading a paper book is an act of continual discovery. With every lift of a page, you have a story progress in time. Lifting a flap is very much the same kind of activity, except in this case you are revealing a truth that is both part and not part of that particular page. In the case of Shea’s book, the flaps reveal untruths, in a sense. The flaps sometimes reveal something true, but generally they’re showing things that are false.

Is this a problem? That’s the real concern with the book, I guess. Some parents might worry that the book is teaching their kids that caps grow into hats and all that. Sure, there’s a portion at the end where all becomes clear, but by the time you get back there, wouldn’t “the damage be done”? Not as such. It’s important to note, though, that the book isn’t telling you that a shovel will become a plow or a watch a clock. Rather they’re asking the reader. It’s allowing a certain level of interaction between the parents and their children. A kid is asked “if this, then this?” And as the parent goes through it with the kid they can correct them themselves. Some people feel that a book for kids has to do all the work for yo