Dance, Pioneer, Dance By Rick Walton Illustrated by Brad Teare Deseret Book (Salt Lake City), 1997. Hardbound: 30 pages. ISBN: 1-57345-243-2 Suggested retail price: $1.99 (US)
Reviewed by: Cathy Gileadi Wilson

You've got to read this children's book aloud to hear the square-dance caller's cadences:

Right and left grand, away you fly To the Valley by and by A right and a left around the ring While chickens fly and roosters sing.

This is a fantasy on pioneer square dance, starting out innocently enough as the pioneers gather and the fiddler tunes up. The etching-like illustrations are done in gentle colors, which understatement gets to be a little underwhelming for a whole book, but there are some wonderful images: "What d'you say? We'll dance tonight!" shows a sour-faced fellow turning away, his plate full of food, but then a pop-eyed, grey-haired fellow being happily hauled along by a sweet-faced potential partner, lots of fun!

Right away you begin to figure out that this is no literal square dance. "Stop and dance with the grizzly bear" gives us a really pop-eyed brother flying into the arms of a very thick and substantial grizzly. The other dancers watch horrified, till the next page. . . .and then everybody kicks it up together. Pretty soon all the animals, wild and domestic, are dancing and playing the night away with the pioneers.

Some of the lines work with real charm:

Pioneer dance, Pioneer dance, Pick up your heels and hitch up your pants

and some of them less so:

Now stop and jump! Jump all around Get those two feet off the ground

-- which seems to stick a little in the throat, between the "jumps."

One the one hand, the gentle coloring of the dance-at-night illustrations reflect well the earthy naturalness of pioneer life, yet on the other hand you seem to want more punch as the book progresses. Similarly, the text works well for what it purports to do, yet it doesn't ever take you to the level of hilarity that the content suggests. I am thinking of the cumulative animal illustrations for "A Farmyard Song" ("I had a cat and the cat pleased me"), by Bill Martin, Jr., in the Sounds of Language series, which is comparable in content; somehow Dance, Pioneer, Dance doesn't achieve a similar height of hilarity, though the central concept is pretty similar.

Did my kids enjoy reading this book with me? Yes. Did they ask for a rereading? No. Did they pick it up and reread it on their own? Again, no. Would I buy it for ourselves? No, I don't think so. But then I only buy books that we have to have or die. . . . and this one didn't draw us enough for that. On the other hand, who could resist:

Ingo, bingo, sixpenny high, Big pig, little pig, root hog or die!

At the very end there's a nice page of historical notes, usable with most ages of children, I'd say, explaining that the characters depicted in the book, including the animals, were members of the first party of Mormon pioneers to cross the plains. It identifies people by name and domestic animals by number (no details on the wild ones, however).

Finally -- I love the rich red color of the end papers.

Cathy Gileadi