Gus & Sully Watch the Weather
by Steve Light; illus. by the author
Preschool    Candlewick    16 pp.
3/24    9781536230048    $7.99

Purple rhino Gus, in his stripey pajamas, exuberantly greets mouse Sully: “What’s the weather like today?” Sully speculates that it could be sunny, but Gus imagines himself with big droplets of sweat, and protests: “Phew! Too hot.” Sully, meanwhile, imagines himself stretched out on a towel: “Mmmm. Toasty.” The two go back and forth, thinking about weather that might be cloudy, snowy, foggy, or rainy. Each time, they have different responses to the type of weather, as when Gus loves the idea of flying a kite on a windy day, but Sully’s kite blows away. The one kind of weather they agree on is the “beautiful” weather after the rain, with a rainbow stretching over them both. This brief board book has a very simple text but lots of playful humor, and small details to notice such as Sully’s horizontal stripes and Gus’s vertical ones. Light’s (Black Bird Yellow Sun) watercolor illustrations use a mostly limited palette with yellows, purples, blues, and grays that seem to convey all of the different types of weather, with black pen-and-ink swirls and lines communicating motion. A good first look at all kinds of weather through the eyes of an engaging pair of friends.

From the January/February 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.