Meet me in the middle

Patient Pig and Eager Eagle help each other up their games. Author/entrepreneur Vaynerchuk casts animal VeeFriends from his line of NFT trading cards and reworks values explored in his business self-help guide Twelve and a Half (2021) for this flip book. Starting from one end of the book, readers meet Patient Pig, who eats breakfast ("the most important meal of the day," she says) and so arrives at the playground after the big basketball game has started. Still, though she helps her team win by passing whenever anyone's open, she never scores; later she joins Eager Eagle for some practice at taking the ball to the net. Readers can then begin the book from the other end. Eager Eagle skips breakfast to arrive first (and soon runs out of energy as the game goes on), but afterward he commends Patient Pig for her style of play and coaches her; meanwhile, she teaches him not to force his shots. "We're a great team…when we meet in the middle," they chorus, lounging head to head on the central spread. The dialogue is stilted ("I feel a lot better now! Your plans made this possible." "Your excitement made me want to work harder"), while Lambe's stubby-limbed, googly-eyed cartoon animals display a limited range of stylized expressions and postures. Young readers will certainly come away feeling instructed, though less than engaged. Trite coaching with little net gain. (Picture book. 5-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.