Logo-Larceny! Rhyme Crime by Jon Burgerman

ONCE UPON A TIME
A THIEF COMMITTED A CRIME.

HAMMY'S BRAND-NEW HAT
WAS SWAPPED FOR A CAT.

Now cats can be warm and furry, kinda like a cap, but getting one to act like a hat on your head is probably in the category of things that are not gonna happen.

The crime wave escalates: Gummy's head becomes a piece of bread. And Tootie's beloved dog is turned into...

A LOG [bark! bark!]

(Get it? log? bark?)

The illicit activity accelerates. A lovely smile becomes a crocodile. A sneeze becomes a smelly cheese. A salty sea captain has to sail away on his... goat! What can stop this miscreant from his dual career of pilfering and misusing poetic license?

Well, believe it or not, it's citrus to the rescue. The malefactor hits the wall when he tries to switch an orange for a

"UMMM, ... SPLORANGE ...ZORANGE? ... PORANGE?

Channeling Adan Rex's Nothing Rhymes with Orange our loquacious crook's vocabulary stalls out and he ends his tale in jail, in Jon Burgerman's Rhyme Crime (Dial Books, 2018), a quirky rhyming story that is a surefire snicker-getter for youngsters, all the while sneaking in some sound-alike words that slip in reading skills along the way. In fact, a crafty teacher could use this book to build a cross-curriculum art-and-wordplay lesson by having students come up with their own comic characters and swapping some witty but nitwitty word pairs, like juice and moose or wagon and dragon. Burgerman's silly psychodelic sketches are pure fun, perfectly paced to get the most out of his clever book design. Booklist aply calls this one "more page-turn-based tomfoolery!"