Out Came the Sun: A Day in Nursery Rhymes.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Heather Collins has been illustrating children’s books for 30 years. When asked to create a nursery rhyme anthology for Kids Can Press, she applied her craft in a most creative way. She envisioned a family of stuffed animals living in a big, yellow house in the country, and imagined what a busy day might look like for them. Then, she figured out a way to tell the story of that day in nursery rhymes. The result is Out Came the Sun.

Adults and children alike will delight in Collins’s flight of fancy. Her whimsical illustrations can’t help but warm the heart as readers join a hen, a goose, an elephant, and a teddy bear, along with some dogs, cats, pigs, and bunnies, in the adventures of their day. The colours are rich enough to attract babies’ attention, but soft enough to be pleasing to parents, and the pictures are filled with enough activity to help very early readers decipher the words on each page.

Out Came the Sun is a book the whole family can snuggle up to. Babies will like the colours, toddlers will like the rhymes, preschoolers will like the story, and school-aged children will like to read it with very little help. Best of all, parents will like the family time spent with a good book. Highly recommended.