It Looked Like Spilt Milk
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Harper & Row
)It Looked Like Spilt Milk is an American children's
pig, a sheep, a birthday cake, a tree, an ice cream cone, a flower, an angel, a squirrel, a mitten, and finally a great horned owl. But it wasn't any of those 13 things. (That is, as the first 13 pages read, "Sometimes it looked like 'item name'. But it wasn't 'item name'".) The silhouette shape makes the reader know it is a secret item until the last page. At the end of the book, the last page repeats the phrase as the first page's line (as the narration reads, "Sometimes it looked like spilt milk. But it wasn't spilt milk".). It wasn't really spilt milk but only a cloud in the sky
. (That is, as the phrase --on the last page-- reads, "It was just a cloud in the sky".) Then the silhouette shape becomes a real cloud in the daytime sky revealing that it was just a cloud. Then the changing white silhouette turns into a real cloud and the cloud goes up into the blue sky (which is what the white "item" really becomes). The last page becomes the blue sky and the white silhouette shape which turned into a cloud. On the last page, the silhouette shape is now a real item. That is, a cloud. Then the book ends.
A
audio cassette and compact disc version by Live Oak Media was published in 1988 and has the narration of Peter Fernandez
with the music heard at the beginning and end and read without music.
Reception
Kirkus Reviews wrote "Children love to play this game from earliest identification, and will like a book that plays it with them. Blue and white silhouettes make a cute idea book."[1]
References
- ^ "It Looked Like Spilt Milk". www.kirkusreviews.com. Kirkus Media LLC. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
- Bader, Barbara, (1976) American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within, Macmillan p. 527. ISBN 0-02-708080-3
- Fredericks, Anthony D. (1993) Involving Parents Through Children's Literature: Preschool-Kindergarten, Libraries Unlimited, p. 27. ISBN 1-56308-022-2
- Silvey, Anita (1995) Children's Books and Their Creators, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, p. 597. ISBN 0-395-65380-0
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