By Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Two voices you never see spend a whole book arguing about whether the animal on the page is a duck or a rabbit, and the animal is both.
There's a drawing. Two lines. Somebody says it's totally a duck. Somebody else says it's for sure a rabbit. And they're off. Those are the ears. Those are the bill. It's about to eat a piece of bread, no it's about to eat a carrot. Look, it's drinking water like a duck does, no, it's hopping. You never see either arguer and you never get told who's right, because the drawing is both and the whole book rides on your child's eye flipping between them. Then the argument gets loud enough that the creature leaves, and both voices finally decide the other one had a point, at which moment a new animal wanders in and it might be an anteater and it might be a brachiosaurus. And here we go again.
Almost every book about seeing things differently has to tell your child that people see things differently. This one skips the telling and does it to them. Your child looks at two lines and sees a duck. Then their own eye slips and it's a rabbit, and it will not go back, and nobody made that happen but them. That's a genuine thing to feel at five, and it's the only version of this idea a young child can't argue with, because it happened inside their own head. Tom Lichtenheld draws it with almost nothing, a bold outline on white, so there is nowhere to hide and nothing to be distracted by. And the last page is the sly bit: the two arguers finally give in to each other and immediately start the same fight about a completely different animal. Being generous once doesn't cure anybody.