Anna Banana by Sigal Adler
Published: 2020
Buy on Amazon
Anna lives in a banana. There’s not much room inside her tall, thin home, so she goes on a journey to find a new piece of produce to live in. Her dutiful pets trail along behind her.
If an author asked for my advice I would usually caution against rhyming, but this book was a happy exception. The rhymes are blunt and silly and not at all syrupy, nor do they throw in a lot of extra phrasing just to bludgeon in a rhyme.
The art is absolutely gorgeous. The color choices pop on every page and the texture techniques are perfectly tactile for preschoolers. Anna is an expressive character, but even better, her dog and cat are always doing something even more interesting in the background. I loved their exhausted faces as Anna’s search for a home drags them from one place to another.
There’s no real lesson learned by Anna’s search; she continues her hunt until she finds something that satisfies her (I won’t spoil what). Not every story necessarily needs a driving point, especially for this age group. Anna Banana is a well-crafted work with a haunting scene of towering carrots at dusk.