Pull Yourself Together! Bonaparte Falls Apart by Margery Cuyler

BONAPARTE WAS FALLING APART AND THIS REALLY SHOOK HIM UP.

Bonaparte is a little skeleton who has a hard time keeping it together. If he peddles his bike a bit too fast, a foot falls off. If he catches a fast-ball pitch, his baseball glove AND his hand fly off, ball and all. When he takes a big bite of pizza, his jaw actually drops!

"WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN SCHOOL STARTS?

EVERYONE WILL MAKE FUN OF ME!"

It's not like all the kids in Boney's group aren't a bit, er, unusual--Franky Stein, Blacky Widow, and Mummicula are not exactly your average school kids. They try to be helpful, retrieving his boney limbs--when they can find them. But sometimes their playtime turns into a tiresome scavenger hunt for Bonaparte's parts.

Franky offers mechanical assistance, gluing and screwing Boney's legbones back on. But Boney winds up too uptight to move! Blacky offers a protective web to keep it all together, but when Boney tries to play, he and the web turn into a tangle-jangle. Mummicula tries out his skills, but he gets a little over-zealous with the winding wrap and covers Bonaparte's whole skull.

"WHERE IS EVERYBODY?"

Bonaparte knows his constant bone shedding is not going to be cool for school. Even his monster pals are weary with chasing down his body parts. But then Mummicula spots a dog running by with a bone in his mouth and has a brainstorm!

What if the pooch can be trained to retrieve Boneparte's missing parts?

"BONE-ANZA!" SAID BONEPARTE. "YOU ARE MY BONE-A FIDE FRIEND!"

With an, er, "service dog" on the job, Bonaparte's missing parts problem is solved in Margery Cuyler's Bonaparte Falls Apart (Crown Books, 2017). Cuyler is an author well known for her holiday books and funny pun-ditry, plying the power of paronomasia (the fancy word for wordplay) in a witty story great for the first weeks of school and for the upcoming scary season. Fitting in (and fitting together) with classmates is hard to do, but with the appealing illustrations, with Will Terry's blackline drawings set in spot art style on bright white pages, this pair of storytellers manage to make skeletons and little monsters appealing and even charming.

Pair this one with Cuyler's and Terry's clever Skeleton for Dinner (read review here) in which little Skeleton fears that for the witches' dinner, he's wanted to flavor, not savor, the stew.