100 Goats and Granny!
by Atinuke; illus. by Lauren Hinds
Preschool, Primary    Candlewick    40 pp.
5/25    9781536238761    $18.99
e-book ed.  9781536249187    $18.99

This enthusiastic story opens with Granny and a small goat looking lovingly at each other while laundry dries on the line. “Granny’s got a goat!” This turns out to be an understatement: rhyming text ramps up the counting after the page-turn as more goats materialize in the background, climbing everywhere and nibbling the laundry. The colors and expressive shapes in the gouache, colored-pencil, and pen illustrations become more boisterous to match the story’s escalating pace. Soon other people show up to help wrangle the goats, counting them in increments of ten until they confirm that one hundred are present (and wreaking havoc across the pages). The narrative expounds on how Granny gets through her day with all these goats and how occasionally one gets left behind (on the bus or at the hair salon, for example), while spot art provides visual comedy. Readers are encouraged to help perform a rambunctious recount, and indeed Granny is now one goat short. The whole town devolves into chaos knowing this troublemaker is at large, but venerable Granny ultimately gets everything under control…until the next count. The energy of the interactive text enables this story to work well as a group read-aloud, while the illustrations, full of funny details to note and one hundred mischievous goats to count and recount, make it equally effective for close looking and sharing.

From the July/August 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.