Bear's BIG Bottom

This title creates giggles and intrigue, and as the simple, rhymed story unfolds, we do emphasise with poor Bear. ‘The nicest bear you’d ever meet, with little paws and little feet, and a very BIG bear bottom.’ (Pause for the giggles.) It is this very BIG bottom that causes havoc amongst all his friends for it gets in the way of everything, even causing him to slip and sit on a birthday cake. Feeling upset, ‘so sad inside’, poor Bear runs away. The resolution of the story is well-handled, the bold, quite quirky illustrations adding much to the telling. The animals are coloured gently in soft colours with lots of features to amuse the reader, e.g. Rabbit wears specs and a bow tie as well as a party hat, and sports blue nose and whiskers. Bear, his BIG bottom now stuck in an amazingly starkly-branched tree, creates a startling monster image on the page-turn, so it is no wonder that, when Bear wrenches this tree free of the ground and comes to the rescue, the Fox chasing his small friends is terrified! Hooray for Bear’s BIG BOTTOM!