Tap! Tap! Tap!: Dance! Dance! Dance!
by Hervé Tullet; illus. by the author; trans. from French by Christopher Franceschelli
Preschool    Chronicle    64 pp.
5/23    9781797221465    $19.99

Like its predecessors Press Here (rev. 7/11) and Mix It Up (rev. 11/14), this offering by Tullet is a creative and enjoyable model of lo-fi interactivity and a lesson in cause-and-effect, here with an additional element of performance. On the first page we are instructed to place our hand atop a blue handprint and “concentrate.” The next page is a warm-up: colorful motion lines appear around the handprint as we practice wiggling our fingers. Then “the show” begins with stage-direction-like text: “Circle around the page three times…Whooo! Your fingers happily jump around on all the dots…Here they take little leaps, as light and frisky as a baby goat.” The balletic movements result in shapes and patterns that recall Matisse, Haring, and the Lascaux caves, with some room for nonprescriptive creative self-expression. For those who are used to scrolling and swiping, the motions will be familiar; the payoff comes not with pixels but via analog imagination.

From the March/April 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.