Terrific Table Manners

Merrilee Liddiard's retro watercolor illustrations are clearly the book's strongest asset — charming, multiracial, and full of gleeful energy. But Kirkus specifically flagged scansion problems in the rhyming text and called some of the etiquette rules 'musty and outdated,' which matters for a book whose entire reason for existing is to teach those rules. Fun to look at, but not quite the reliable primer it wants to be.