Picture Book Depot
Rita Lorraine

August, 2011

Should an elephant ever forget? Not according to the legends, yet little Elefante is forgetting everything lately.

Elefante, by Vanita Oelschlager of VanitaBooks, LLC, is a super-brief, super-cute book about an emotional little elephant who can’t figure out why he’s forgetting everything. Forgetting such things as tying his shoes and kissing his mother goodbye leads to such upsetting consequences as scraping his knee and making his mother very, very sad. Elefante doesn’t want to make his mother sad, and he definitely doesn’t want to scrape his knee. Why, oh why does he keep forgetting?

But later, Elefante discovers that forgetting isn’t so awful. When he forgets to be shy, he becomes a star, and when he forgets that awful thing his friend Monkey said about his cute elephant ears, they have the best play date ever.

Elefante is a sweet and surprisingly creative little book about remembering, forgetting, and just having fun. The sentences are short, manageable, and quite funny, despite their brevity. The book itself is a tiny, hand-sized paperback made of 98% recycled paper.

Artist Kristin Blackwood’s illustrations of bright-eyed Elefante and his colorful friends are done completely in soy ink. The interesting patterns on Elefante’s ears, Mouse’s scarf and other characters in the book are produced by items like sponges, bread wrappers, bubble wrap and sand paper, all of which were once consigned to Blackwood’s trash can.

For a wonderful little lap book that is also environmentally correct, be sure to read Elefante.