Inchworm and a Half

March 26, 2001
Pinczes's latest book focusing on a math concept comes up short. Measuring by whole numbers and fractions is the lesson of the day here, but unlike her previous A Remainder of One and One Hundred Hungry Ants, which successfully focused on one concept throughout, this title takes on too much. The narrative features a wacky refrain ("Squirmy, wormy, hoppity-hoop!/ We measure everything, loopity loop") and stars an inchworm that sets out to measure the vegetables in her garden: "Her measuring method is simple:/ each loop that she takes is one inch./ She starts at one end, and results will depend/ on the number of loops--that's a cinch!" However, readers may have difficulty discerning, from Enos's cartoon-like pictures, the correlation between the worms' lengths and what they are measuring. The art, inexplicably, is not to scale, and as smaller worms--whose respective loopy paths measure one-half, one-third and one-fourth of an inch--enter the illustrations, things become even more confusing. Unfortunately, the vague measurements depicted in the art and lack of the humorous story line usually associated with the author's work add up to one disappointing volume. Ages 4-8.