Name: Flip and Flop
ISBN: 9780439288927

Dawn Apperley

A two-year-old penguin named Flop is sad when his five-year-old brother, Flip, would rather play with Hip, a polar bear friend his own age, in an Arctic romp that will warm the hearts of little siblings of every climate.

Flip and Flop

Sarah Sammis

Flip and Flop by Dawn Apperley tells the story of sibling penguins who are tired of playing with each other and the new friends they each make. The basic theme of learning the balance between family time and personal time is a good one but the book could have better.

The problem lies with who the new friends are: a pair of polar bear cubs. The few times I've read this book with my children, they both complain (rightly so) that polar bears live in the north and penguins live in the south. I know it's a work of fiction and Apperley isn't the only one to mix the two species together (Coca Cola) but there's no reason why the other friends couldn't have also been penguins. They could have been a different species or different colors.

If you can get past the polar bears, the story itself is a fun tongue twister with similar difficulty as Fox in Socks or Hop on Pop (both by Dr. Seuss). It gets harder with the introduction of the two bears: Hip and Hop. I just wish they weren't bears.