Can You Greet the Whole Wide World?: 12 Common Phrases in 12 Different Languages
by Lezlie Evans; illustrated by Denis Roche
Bonjour! Guten Tag! Shalom! Ciao!
I'm on a multi-culti roll lately. At least there can be peace on the pages of kiddie books, if not elsewhere. This is a short, sweet book on how to greet your friends and get your day started in 12 different languages, including Hindi, Chinese and Spanish.
Each page has a rhyming quatrain to introduce a phrase or word such as "How are you?" or "please" followed by a list of translations. On the opposite page, an orange cat dressed up as a boy does all the waving and greeting and asking and thanking to his multi-culti friends and grown-ups.
An orange cat, of course, keeps things racially neutral, in keeping with the text's theme of inclusion.
Everybody gets their turn being #1, so while the cat says "hello" in Hebrew (shalom), he asks, "What's your name?" in Arabic (ma ismok). Sounds fair to me.
The flat, faux naive illustrations in straight-off-the-palette primary colors keep things simple and cheerful.
Rating: *\*\
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