By Jessica Spanyol
Child’s Play, 2021
12 pages
9781786284921
Ages 1-4
(Reviewed with Rosa Plays Ball / A Rosa le encanta jugar a lo pelota.) Brown-skinned, glasses-wearing, curly dark-haired Rosa engages in active and imaginative play on her own and with friends in these bilingual (English/Spanish) board books. In Rosa Loves Cars / A Rosa le encantan los carros, Rosa plays with a variety of wheeled-vehicle toys, including cars, a monster truck, a camper, and a fire engine, which she uses to orchestrate the rescue of a comically wide-eyed pink toy cat in the crook of a tree. (“Stuck cat! Emergency … Gato en peligro! Emergencia!”) She plays mechanic, too, engaging in a small auto repair, and also makes a car of her own out of a cardboard box. In Rosa Plays Ball / A Rosa le encanta jugar a lo pelota, Rosa plays with all sorts of balls, from soccer, football, basketball, and baseball with friends to the tennis ball she throws for the dogs, not to mention the ball pit she falls into and the toy bowling set (“Strike! … Di en el blanco!”) Rosa’s preschool-age friends across the two cheery offerings include Mustafa (dark skin, black hair), Sarah (white skin, blonde hair), Samira (brown skin, black hair, sometimes uses a wheelchair), Biba (light brown skin, dark straight hair), and Marcel (white skin, red hair, glasses). Other books in the series available in bilingual editions include Rosa Loves Dinosaurs / A Rosa le encantan los dinosaurios and Rosa Rides Her Scooter / A Rosa le encanta montar en su patineta. English language-only editions of these and other Rosa books were published in 2018. ©2021 Cooperative Children’s Book Center