“This brightly illustrated picture book, offers a lighthearted introduction to homophones, words that have different spellings and different meanings, though they sound the same. After moving to the zoo, Aunt Ant writes a letter (“Dear Deer . . .”) to tell a friend about her new neighbors, such as the moose who loves mousse and the giraffe whose “long neck lets him CHOOSE what he CHEWS.” The author/illustrator of Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin (2006), Barretta illustrates the text with a series of colorful, cartoonlike watercolor paintings, large enough in scale for classroom sharing and lightened with comic effects. Some of the scene, including the one illustrating the giraffe, involve rotating the book to see a vertical picture instead of the horizontal one. A curiosity for young children and a pleasant addition to school units that include homophones, this could be paired with Arlene Alda’s Did You Say Pears?”

“In the tradition of Fred Gwynne’s A Chocolate Moose for Dinner (1976) comes this comic tale replete with homophones. Aunt Ant is writing a letter to an antlered friend (“Dear Deer. . . “), describing her new life at the zoo, a place full of words that sound the same yet have different meanings. From the moose who loves mousse, to the hoarse horse, the monkey who tells a tale as he hangs from his tail and the bee that had to flee and so flew from the flea that has the flu, each page is filled with creatures and actions that contain homophones. All of the paired words are in bold type, though nothing differentiates one homophone from another and at times more than one set appears on a page at once. Occasionally, the text feels a little forced, but overall the humor compensates, and youngsters will be tickled by the homophones and the brightly colored, appealing illustrations. Beware: Children will gain not only prowess in recognizing homophones but also the ability to produce bad puns!”