Fun picture book about counting, with the numbers presented in both English and Spanish. Anyway, as the story goes, Granny is on death's door and Death turns up to collect. He's a walking skeleton, very polite, but Granny keeps putting him off with household chores she has to do before she can shuffle off this mortal coil with him. You can guess the sort of thing - one house to sweep, two pots of tea to boil, three pounds of corn to make into tortillas and so on. And it's all very good-natured and entertaining, and the illustrations are fun, but all I can think is the little prospective readers can't count to ten but they're perfectly fine with the concept of death?

Granted, I never spend any time with children. What they grasp and at which stage of their development they grasp it is beyond me. But don't basic numbers come before "So, death is a thing and it's coming for Granny"? Not in this book! Here, kids who haven't yet learned their numbers are presumably expected to be already competent with the idea of mortality. As I said, maybe it's just me, and I can't pretend I didn't enjoy the seeming disconnect. But still, I don't remember The Very Hungry Caterpillar ending with a coffin instead of a chrysalis...