I’ll Be a Chicken Too

An energetic frolic through the animal kingdom, Lana Vanderlee's first foray into children's books celebrates the imaginative play between caregiver and child. Using second-person throughout the narrative, the rhyming couplets navigate a day brimming over with energy and joy, starting with a parent and child in a bed with early-bird chickens (most of them are stuffies), a penultimate visit with sleepy bats hanging upside down in trees, and back to the family with the chickens, now home to roost.

Illustrator Mike Deas captures the spirit of the jaunty rhymes with bright depictions of loving families from diverse backgrounds (including one featuring grandparents), with each spread introducing a different family engaging in animal antics, with those animals brought to life amidst through the participants' powers of make-believe. All of the adults engage in child-led activities involving barking, splashing, and bouncing about in good-natured ways, both at home and in their communities. Of especial joy and sweetness is a family passing a beach ball to each other while swimming in a lake, with imaginary hippos basking in the water at their side. In the second-last double spread, readers see a parent and his children poring over a storybook, with all the animals mentioned in the previous couplets surrounding them as stuffed toys.
I’ll Be a Chicken Too is a board book that invites families to engage in imitative play initiated by the children, reminding adults to enliven their lives by participating wholeheartedly and forgetting devices and screens for a romp through the imagination instead. Parents and caregivers can use the board book as a jumping-off point for their own explorations of the animal kingdom as a simple expression of familial love (and a way to burn off energy). While Orca books is publishing this title as a board book, this title straddles that transitional bridge to longer picture books, given that it is slightly more textually heavy than board books, but lacks a central character and defined narrative. I’ll Be a Chicken Too is a fine addition to both the home and public libraries, and it will be sure to become dog-eared through repeated reads.