Counting to Bananas

Carrie Tillotson's debut is one of those picture books that makes caregivers laugh out loud right alongside the kids. Banana is ready to star in a proper counting book, but the narrator keeps inserting animals to rhyme with the fruit — pigs with figs, bears with pears, leeches with peaches — and Banana's escalating indignation is perfectly calibrated for interactive read-alouds. The metafictional structure is genuinely rare in the picture-book space. Amazon named it a Best Children's Book of 2022; it earned an Oregon Spirit Book Award Honor, a Texas Library Association 2x2 selection, and an Oregon Book Award finalist nod. The honest caveats are small: the single joke may wear thin on solo re-reads, and children looking for a straight early-numeracy tool will find the counting secondary to the comedy. As a read-aloud shared experience, though, it is outstanding.