Which Witch is Which? - Hardcover

A fairly clever idea executed with exceptional imagination and wit, this guessing-game book from Judi Barrett and Sharleen Collicott asks readers to decide which witches are doing what in a series of colorful, densely illustrated witchy tableaus. For example, after viewing a ludicrously well-dressed sextet of bear witches who are riding atop a fuzzy, veiled dinosaur wearing pink garters, we're asked, "Which witch has an awful itch? Is it the one doing a jitterbug? Is it the one lying on the rug? Is it the one looking very smug? Or is it the one playing with a pug?"

These often open-ended questions keep the guessing interesting throughout 13 different scenes, but it's Collicott's richly bizarre style and compositions that discourage you from ever turning to a new page. Each group of witches hails from a different species (newts, cats, cows, etc.) and seems loosely involved in some central activity (hitching a wild boar to a wagon, quilting, putting on a play), but there's just so much going on in every single scene--weird stuff, Hieronymus Bosch-type stuff, only much, much cuter--that kids will come up with far more questions than the ones that the book asks. Why are those lizard witches wearing armor and disguises? What is that pig witch painting anyway? And the cat witch with the coolest shoes--which witch is that? (Ages 4 to 8) Paul Hughes