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How Many Jelly Beans?: A Giant Book of Giant Numbers!
By Andrea Menotti
Illustrated by Yancey Labat
Chronicle Books
$18.99
ISBN: 978-1-4521-0206-1
Ages 4-8
On shelves February 29th

Boy, I tell you. You get a kid and suddenly you find yourself scheming all these crazy schemes. “I’m going to get my kid to like vegetables!” “I’m going to get my kid to appreciate classical music!” “I’m going to get my kid to like math!” Crazy, right? I mean the first two seem doable, but the third? I’m an English major, guys. What are the chances that I’m even capable of instilling a math love in my offspring? To the rescue comes a new generation of picture books for kids with math-centric concepts. I’m not talking about books that take a math problem, turn it into a story, and somehow that’s going to magically get kids excited about integers. No, I’m talking about math books that practically dare kids to deny the pleasure of counting, estimating, etc. Such books most certainly exist, though it takes some digging to locate them. Now at long last we’ve a book that not only encourages kids to count on their own, but hits them over the head with a number they may hear all the time but could never quite comprehend. Until now.

Emma and Aiden. They like their jelly beans, they do. When Emma is asked how many she’d prefer she opts for a standard “Ten!” Not to be outdone, her brother Aiden asks for “Twenty!” So naturally Emma asks for twenty-five, and Aiden sees her twenty-five and raises the number to fifty. At a certain point, of course, Emma points out to her bro that when it comes to numbers like five hundred jelly beans (and you can see all five hundred on the table in front of them) there’s no way a person could eat that many. Aiden points out that in a year he could eat as many as a thousand. Up and up and up the numbers go, with more and more jelly beans filling the pages until at long last you reach the thrilling conclusion. Turn the page and you find some folded pages. On one side the kids are suggesting a MILLION jelly beans. Well, as it just so happens, that’s how many fill these folded pages. And finally, at long last, Aiden concedes that maybe a million, just maybe, might be too much.

It’s nice when you can imagine how a book’s going to be used. Author Andrea Menotti also happens to be a Senior Editor at Chronicle Books (whatta coincidence!). Her goal here was to give the book the barest outline of a skeleton of a plot on which to hang the art and those images of copious delicious colorful sugar bombs that appear on every page. The ending, I’ll tell you right now, relies on the shock of the number rather than the interaction between the two kids. Basically the dare at the end of the book that one number or another is “too many” is finally accepted. So there you go. When you first open it up you come to a two-page spread where Emma is being offered ten jellybeans. At this point a certain strain of child is going to insist on counting those beans, just to make sure the author and illustrator got it right. They’ll probably be the same kids that count the twenty an