The simplest of illustrations, and a book’s worth of confusion is born.

In Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld’s Duck! Rabbit!, we start off with an unusual conundrum: Nobody is really sure what the main character actually is. We’re pretty sure it’s an animal. Of some sort. We’ve got it narrowed down to two, but that’s as close as we can guess. S/he could be a duck – see there? The bill, and the bread eating? or S/he could be a rabbit – only witness the carrot snack and the long, pointed ears. There’s really no telling, I suppose. In the end, it all comes down to a matter of perspective.

That right there is the key to why this is such a great book: it’s all in how you look at it. You can get a good 25 minutes worth of class discussion rolling when you introduce this book, and kids will line up to battle toe to toe over whether or not this poor animal is a rabbit or a duck. It’s actually a really intriguing thing to watch, and I’d recommend it just on that basis – never let it be said that Kindergarten teachers don’t like to stir up certain kinds of trouble. (Literary rumbles? I’m so on board, kiddos!)

But say you’re not leading a group of 20 kindergarteners and attempting to keep them from rioting against each other over the right to claim ultimate ownership of this animal – this book still deserves a place on your shelf, and I’ll tell you why: because perspective taking is a necessary & valuable civil skill, that is hard to be subtle about.  Because sometimes you just need your kid to be able to see that there’s more than one way of looking at an issue.

In that case, having the Duck! Rabbit! book in your common background already is going to come in handy. I have – on more than one occasion – pulled out the “What we have here is a Duck! Rabbit! type situation” explanation with the kids under my care. At the very least, it gives them a vocabulary to build on in those cases – “But you get that he was seeing ears while you were seeing a bill, right? It wasn’t like he was purposefully trying to hurt your feelings, you guys were just coming at it from completely different angles.”

Perspective taking is step 1 in creating empathy; a precursor to effective communication; and an all around necessary social skill (that people too often lack). A book like this – that’s fun and quick and quirky and silly – that still manages to teach essential interpersonal skills? Put it on your “picture books are for everybody” list. (Because I’m pretty sure I met a guy at the bank the other day who could have used a reminder that he was seeing a Rabbit! while everyone else was wandering around looking at Ducks!; Maybe it would have helped him chill out about 2000% and the rest of us in line wouldn’t have been glancing nervously around, wondering if the bank had an actual security guard or not.)