Counting books usually count objects on a white page. Divya Srinivasan sends Little Owl out through the night forest instead, so one is a fox saying hello, two is a pair of beavers waving, three is skunks eating berries, and ten is the acorns Raccoon has piled up by the time Little Owl gets home.

The art is why this one gets picked off the shelf: deep ink black backgrounds with the animals glowing out of them in flat warm color, which is genuinely unusual in a board book and holds a baby's eye far longer than pastel does. Srinivasan is an animator, and it shows in how the pages move.

Eighteen board pages, seven inches square, from the author-illustrator of Little Owl's Night and Octopus Alone. It teaches the numbers without ever sounding like it is teaching, which is the difference between a counting book a child asks for and one a parent has to suggest.