Your Baby's First Word Will Be DADA

April 27, 2015
Ten years after Fallon’s Snowball Fight!, the Tonight Show host returns with a witty reminder that as much as parents may try to shape their children’s destinies, kids will do as kids will do. Ordóñez (Marina and the Little Green Boy) deploys a barnyard’s worth of father-child animal pairs, framed in square panels with fathers on the left and their offspring on the facing pages. In speech-balloon dialogue, the elder cows, sheep, bees, rabbits, donkeys, and other animals shout an encouraging “Dada!” at their children, whose responses are more typical to their species—a “squeak” for a triangular gray mouse or a “ribbit” for a squat green frog. The fathers’ expressions range from concerned to downright irate, but the baby animals couldn’t be more pleased with themselves. The comparatively loquacious closing pages round up all the animals (“Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time...”), and the young animals finally make their proud papas’ dreams come true. A punchy and deceptively simple story that will make for some fun readalouds. Ages 1–3. Author’s agency: Creative Artists Agency.

May 1, 2015
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say "Dada" in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon. A grumpy bull says, "DADA!"; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, "DADA!"; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of "Dada" or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, "Now everybody get in line, let's say it together one more time...." Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, "DADA!" (except the duckling, who says, "quack"). Ordonez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of "DADA" appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals' mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny. Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)

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