Light sent a playful dragon through the streets of a city in Have You Seen My Dragon? (2014), and this time a hirsute monster is lost at the county fair. On wide white pages covered with intricate pen-and-ink line drawings, a little girl entreats the reader to help find her monster. "Did he go to judge the pies?" she asks, while the monster juggles a few tarts. "He loves music!" reveals the monster in a jaunty cap leading a marching band. In addition to the lively seek-and-find illustrations, each of the 20 double-page spreads highlights one particular shape, which is filled in with a single hue. And these aren't your everyday circles, squares, and triangles, though those are there, too. Light shows youngsters octagons, rhombuses, quatrefoils, curvilinear triangles, trapeziums, and heptagons, among many others. Though some shapes are a little tough to tell apart, such as the rhombus and parallelogram or oval and ellipse, most kiddos will be too interested in spotting the playful monster to notice. Frolicsome fun with some sneaky education thrown in.

PreS-Gr 2 Light uses black-on-white pen-and-ink illustrations for a double conceptfirst to seek and find a friendly monster at the county fair and second to identify the geometric shapes found there. Each spread features the monster hidden within the drawing, along with the featured shape colored in ink, sometimes just once, sometimes multiple times. The top right corner names the shape and shows its outline, from the triangle, square, and oval to the quatrefoil, trapezium, and heptagon. The Common Core State Standards require different levels of geometric familiarity across the grades, and this book may be useful in introducing the youngest students to those shapes that that they will not be required to know until second grade. The spunky, retro drawings of a curly haired, ovoid-headed little girl and her hairy monster friend send readers from the carousel to the roller coaster, serving also as a primer to an American tradition that many urban students may only meet in a book. Pair this title with Tana Hoban's classic Shapes, Shapes, Shapes (Greenwillow, 1986) for the other side of the coina photographic introduction to shapes in found in a city. VERDICT A fun-filled interactive outing with an unintrusive math lesson to boot. Lisa Lehmuller, East Providence School District, RI