Outstanding in the Rain

K-Gr 2—Verbal and graphic acrobatics abound in this visually playful yet not altogether successful picture book, "a whole story with holes." The spare narrative finds a boy and his mother celebrating his fourth birthday at Coney Island, a locale that provides plenty of illustrative opportunity for Viva to display his appealingly retro graphic style. A five-color palette of red-orange, teal, yellow, beige, and brown feels fresh, as do the strategically placed die-cut holes that create new words and images with every page turn. The graphic transformations are simple and pleasing, such as turning an umbrella into a birthday cake; however the same cannot be said of the verbal gymnastics, which weigh down the rhyming text with purpose. Utilizing a series of oronyms (a sequence of words that sound the same as a different sequence of words), "Ice cream" becomes "I scream," "her ear" becomes "her rear," and "fork handles" becomes "four candles," transformations that appear clever but ultimately feel forced and gimmicky.