The Greedy Triangle http://www.fishpond.com/Books/Greedy-Triangle-Marilyn-Burns-Gordon-Silveria/9780545042208

By Marilyn Burns, Gordon Silveria

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PreS-Gr 1‘An offbeat introduction to geometry. When a triangle tires of having only three sides, he asks the shapeshifter to change him first into a quadrilateral, then a pentagon, a hexagon, and so forth until he realizes he is happiest as a triangle: he can hold up a roof, be a slice of a pie and, best of all, slip into place when people put their hands on their hips. ``That way I always hear the latest news...which I can tell my friends.'' The text is clever and shows more than the usual places to find shapes‘part of a computer screen, a section of a soccer ball, a floor tile. The acrylic and colored-pencil illustrations are colorful, abstract, and filled with smiling shapes done in shades of turquoise, pink, and yellow. A two-page spread of suggestions for adults to reinforce the math lessons featured is included at the end of the book.‘Christine A. Moesch, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, NY

The author of The I Hate Mathematics Book celebrates geometric shapes in this informative but visually cluttered addition to the Marilyn Burns Brainy Day series. Her main character, a triangle with gleaming black eyes and a perky grin, leads a full life-it can take the shape of a slice of pie or rest in an elbow's angle ``when people put their hands on hips.'' Yet the triangle aspires to greater complexity, so it asks a ``shapeshifter'' to turn it into a quadrilateral (the shape of a TV or a book's page), then into a pentagon (a house's facade) and so forth. Burns fails to show that the triangle is ``greedy''; it's just adventurous. But her story successfully introduces basic polygons, and her afterword to adults suggests ways of teaching children some of the finer points about geometry (e.g., the concept of a plane or rhomboids). For his picture book debut, Silveria chooses tart shades of yellow, orange, lavender and green. His airbrushed colored-pencil compositions have suitably angular details; speckled paint and multicolored doodles soften the effect but create a sense of disorder. If the art as a whole is somewhat jumbled, readers still come away from this volume noticing and naming the shapes of the objects around them. Ages 6-9. (Mar.)