Tails Book

Tactile books, with their touchable pictoral inserts, movable pull-tabs, and trite verbiage, are invariably intriguing to the preschool set and wearying to parents. This one is a nice change. It features a collection of appealing baby animals -- not just the usual pigs, racoons, beavers and tigers, but also pandas, weasels, tamarins, and alligators. Each page features a toddler-friendly lift-the-flap, pull-tab, and/or touchable insert, and each scene is introduced with well-paced, punchy rhyming text describing the different tails' attributes. The vocabulary is more varied than the standard board book fare, and many parents will be able to survive two dozen readings without feeling the urge to hide the book on a high shelf.

Tails is better constructed than most books of this genre, with sturdy pull-tabs and heavy pages, and it might even survive more than one child's loving attention. There's a counting and eye-spy activity included at the very end, and each animal is helpfully labeled in the final page. This is a great addition to a preschooler's library.