SKINNER, Tom (text) Janet Wolf (illus.) Bus Fuss New Frontier, 2014 unpaged $24.99 ISBN 9781921928031 SCIS 1674361
Bus Fuss is a strongly bound and brightly illustrated cumulative counting book. It begins: ‘One day, in a wide brown land girt by sea, a wide, brown wombat stopped a bus’. He appears beside an empty road in a bare Australian landscape wearing a shirt with purple flowers and blue and purple striped shorts. The bright red bus stops. Then we see the wombat head along the purple corridor and finally squeeze into one of the lime green seats at the back.
He is followed by two timid turtles, three playful platypuses, four dainty dingoes (with musical instruments and cases), five elderly echidnas, and so on, until ten Tasmanian tigers hop on the bus and all the others, including nine crazy kangaroos, are listed as they ‘hurry and scurry off’ the bus. The creatures, and their very tolerant bus driver, are drawn with humour and affection while the text offers interesting word combinations and descriptions. Adults and children reading this book will enjoy its rather rollicking rhythm and entertaining introduction to numbers.
reviewed by Elspeth Cameron
