Ducking for Apples was published in 2010 by Henry Holt and Company. It was written by Lynne Berry and illustrated by Hiroe Nakata.
The story is pretty simple.
Five goofy ducks (I have no idea about which sex they are but two of the ducks are darker) decide to go for a bike ride. They go up and down hills. They teeter, swerve, totter and curve. At the bottom of a hill, the ducks find a tree with apples. They get some apples and take them to their house where they make apple pie. In the end they fall asleep in front of the fireplace.
Ducking for Apples is a nice story even though it doesn’t say too much. Towards the end the ducks work together as a team to pick the apples and make the apple pie. It’s all fun and games and the ducks don’t really confront anything too serious.
The illustration are extremely well done with watercolors and ink. The sky is always very pleasant in this book and so are the colors used for the fields. There are lots of cute characters all over the pages... but do raccoons live in trees? Some of these illustrations reminded me of what I saw in Japanese language textbooks when I was a child.
The text has quite a bit of rhyming and can be fun to read. There were a couple of sentences which didn’t come of my mouth very smoothly (“five ducks reaching for the sky” and "Too late! Duck legs all give out”) and I found difficult to say with a proper rhythm.
Overall, a nice book to read. Recommended for boys and girls.
