Orange Pear Apple Bear

by Emily Gravett, Emily Gravett (Illustrator)

Overview

Destined to become a contemporary classic, this book has spare text and sweet illustrations but contains only five words: apple, pear, orange, bear—and there. Emily Gravett creates clever variations on this theme by rearranging the words—on one spread, a brown bear juggles an orange, apple, and pear; on another spread, there is an orange-colored apple and a pear-shaped bear. Simple and compelling, children will enjoy reading this book over and over again as they learn many different concepts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442420038
Publisher:	Little Simon
Publication date:	08/23/2011
Series:	Classic Board Books
Edition description:	Repackage
Pages:	24
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	1 - 4 Years

About the Author

Emily Gravett is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including the Kate Greenaway Award–winning Wolves and Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears. She is also the author and illustrator of Again! (shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Award), Wolf Won’t Bite!, Blue Chameleon, The Rabbit Problem, Dogs, Spells, The Odd Egg, Monkey and Me, Orange Pear Apple Bear, and Meerkat Mail. She lives in Brighton, England, with her family. Visit her at EmilyGravett.com.

Emily Gravett is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including the Kate Greenaway Award–winning Wolves and Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears. She is also the author and illustrator of Again! (shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Award), Wolf Won’t Bite!, Blue Chameleon, The Rabbit Problem, Dogs, Spells, The Odd Egg, Monkey and Me, Orange Pear Apple Bear, and Meerkat Mail. She lives in Brighton, England, with her family. Visit her at EmilyGravett.com.

Editorial Reviews

With four words and striking illustrations, author Emily Gravett creates another winner that will sit perfectly alongside Wolves, for which she won Britain's prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal. In Orange Pear Apple Bear, Gravett follows a buoyant bruin through several spreads, rearranging the four words to create different scenes in which the bear interacts with fruit, sometimes even taking on the color of the fruit itself. Sound simple? It is, and that's what makes the book so brilliant. Dazzling, sparse, and always profound, this is a charmer for the youngest readers, whose imaginations are bound to take flight.

…a quietly brilliant book for younger children by Britain's Emily Gravett that includes just five words: the title's four plus a kicker. Each word gets its own iconic rendering, which is then mixed and matched with the others in a rising tide of creative (and instructive) silliness.
—The Washington Post

Elizabeth Ward

Loose line-and-watercolor illustrations ring the changes on all the possible combinations of the four title words in this deliciously playful romp. A very large, very genial bear first contemplates, then plays with the fruit, first turning orange, then morphing into an apple and a pear (in illustrations that emphasize his delightfully rounded posterior). The fruits themselves appear alone, in stacks and in simple compositions that recall Cezanne's still lifes. It's a masterpiece of superbly controlled pacing, each object and its corresponding word appearing initially alone on the page, then combining in twos, then all rushing together as the bear's play intensifies, then slowing again as he eats the fruits, one by one, in a glorious display of happy gluttony. The text employs only the four words of the title (with one notable, concluding exception), rearranging themselves to produce the felicitously surprising pictorial combinations. The creamy background and gray typeface complement the light lines and bright colors of the fruits, and the bear is a striking example of how, in this case at least, less is definitely more. (Picture book. 1-4)

Kirkus Reviews

"Daring, original, and a joy."
— Sunday Times, London

From the Publisher