Everything Is Grape!

PreS-Gr 2–Two friends share a punny, silly, and sometimes baffling adventure. In the opening pages, a child with a puff of blond hair and oversized blue glasses buys a bunch of grapes and walks to a city park. Another child with a swoosh of black hair and a yellow jacket is waiting on a bench. The friends greet each other, then the blond child holds up the fruit and asserts that the grapes are grape-shaped. The other child agrees, to the delight of the first, who proclaims, “Well then, I guess you could say it is in grape shape.” That pun launches the dialogue for the rest of the book. The first child points to a series of other objects they encounter (a box, a balloon, a beehive, a banana, a giraffe) and declares that each is a grape. The second child insists on the facts at first, but becomes increasingly exasperated and eventually worried as the action becomes more unhinged. The blond child, determined to prove that a beehive is a harmless grape, pokes it with a stick. The friends are pursued by a swarm of bees across five pages before finding themselves riding on a giraffe and then dangling from a kite string with few clues about how or why the plot has taken these turns. Tran’s digital illustrations are soft and rounded with pastel-like strokes. She uses simple lines for the characters’ eyebrows to convey an impressive range of emotions. Both characters have pale skin; the eyes of the blond child are simple, rounded oval marks and the child in the yellow jacket has larger almond-shaped eyes. Unfortunately, the puns are uneven in their placement in the story and the eventual resolution isn’t enough to explain the rest of the book.