If It Looks Like a Duck....My Brother the Duck by Pat Zietlow Miller

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Wildlife Management! Rescuing Mrs. Birdley by Aaron Reynolds

MIRANDA MONTGOMERY WAS AN ANIMAL EXPERT.

SHE WATCHED THE NATURE JOE SHOW EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Nature Joe's specialty is restoring lost wild animals out to their proper habitats. From re-placing lost lions to helping homeless lemurs, catching coatis to transporting tortoises, Nature Joe's a good guy.

SO WHEN MIRANDA SAW HER TEACHER AT THE GROCERY STORE, SHE KNEW JUST WHAT TO DO.

Clearly Mrs. Birdley has strayed outside the classroom where she belongs.

SHE HASN'T GOTTEN AGGRESSIVE, BUT MIRANDA WAS SURE SHE WOULD BE MUCH HAPPIER IN HER NATURAL HABITAT.

Well schooled by Nature Joe, Miranda knows all the tricks of the trade. She tries digging a deadfall (lined with soft cushions, of course, to be humane) to trap Mrs. Birdley. But the skittish Mrs. Birdley eludes capture. However, Miranda has observed Mrs. Birdley's habits and diet carefully, and after her drop net is all set, Miranda has the perfect lure--BLUEBERRY YOGURT!

IT WAS ALL MRS. BIRDLEY ATE BACK IN HER NATURAL HABITAT. MRS. BIRDLEY COULDN'T RESIST THE SCENT OF OF FRUITY, LOW-CALORIE GOODNESS!

But when the grocery clerk intervenes with a cheese ball Mrs. Birdley has forgotten at the counter, Mrs. Birdley is distracted and Miranda's net misses the mark. Not to be defeated, Miranda sneaks behind a display of large plastic trash bins until Mrs. Birdley is fully absorbed by some fresh alfalfa sprouts. Down comes the bin over her head, and her teacher is trapped inside. Miranda rolls the bin through town toward the elementary school, with Mrs. Birdley squeaking disquietly inside, and locks her safely back in her classroom. Mrs. Birdley didn't exactly look happy. But...

BEING LOCKED INSIDE HER CLASSROOM ALL WEEKEND WOULD SETTLE HER RIGHT DOWN.

Miranda Montgomery strolls home, feeling proud of her efforts, when she sees something else that requires her expertise. Her principal Mr. Crankerstout is roaming around loose in the lawn mower section of the home improvement store....! As Kirkus Reviews says, "A fun story for all the kids who think their teachers live at school, because... where else would they live?"

Disclaimer! This Book Will Not Be Fun by Cirocco Dunlap

I am just going to sit here in silence and wait for the book to be over.

I don't know why you are still here.

Call yourself warned. The geeky mouse with the big glasses has told you to expect nothing. And disregard that flying whale. He is of no interest, none, none at all.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Hey! You can see him, too? Remarkable.

Oh, drat! He ate my words. What an untoward thing to happen to a narrator. Flying whales can't exist. My Encyclopedia of Creatures says so. Oh, well.

The big-headed mouse has nothing good to say about this book. With a dispassionate demeanor he leads the reader from recto to verso. He perfunctorily points out a boring worm, which suddenly glows like a firefly, which is a good thing, since the lights seem to be out on the next page.

Too much excitement. I will have to follow the worm's footprints.

What's this? A light switch?

It would seem our dyspeptic guide has lead us into a new chapter--a brightly-neon-lit disco party. Whoa!

I didn't sign up for this...

But that music is very spritely! Toe-tapping, you might say.

I am shaking my bottom, as it were.

"There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away," said Emily Dickinson, but even Emily never met a metabook that led her to disco dance. But in Cirocco Dunlap's new This Book Will Not Be Fun(Random House, 2017), even his sober and staid nerd-mouse can find himself going all footloose, exchanging his proper tie for tie-dye and dancing the night away.

Artist Olivier Tallec's illustrations give our straitlaced narrator a good time despite himself, setting him and his blase' ruminations center-page against white backgrounds while the assorted pictorial absurdities are given the full-bleed color treatment. Kids who go for Herve Tullet's best-selling meta-creation Press Here or Deborah Freedman's The Story of Fish and Snail will find that this book IS fun!

Flour Power: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off by Herman Parish

"SHHHHHHH!" said Mr. Rogers, as Amelia Bedelia came in.

"Don't mind him," said Mrs. Rogers. "He's watching his favorite television program."

Chef DuJour was saying, "I'll pick the winner of my Big Bake-Off prize, $1000!"

"Wow!" said Mr. Rogers. "That's a lot of dough!"

"Not really," said Amelia Bedelia. "A thousand bucks is a lot of deer, but there's no doe there."

Amelia Bedelia is the queen of the misunderstood homonym, and even on her day off, she's off and running. Mr. Rogers suggests that Amelia should enter her famous lemon meringue pie in Chef DuJour's Bake-Off, but Amelia points out that she's too busy subbing as chief baker at Grace's Cookie Shop for the day, assisted as usual by her partner in malapropism, Cousin Alcolu.

And soon, over at Grace's shop, Amelia Bedelia and Alcolu set out bravely to follow Grace's plan for the day. First on the list is to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and immediately there's a problem when Alcolu reads Gracie's added instruction:

"Cut the recipe in half."

Amelia Bedelia takes care of that expeditiously. One snip of the cooking shears and the recipe is cut in half. But chipping up all those tiny pieces of chocolate takes a lot more time.

Finally they two are ready for the second item on Gracie's list.

"Bake twelve pound cakes"

"That's a mighty heavy cake!" says Amelia Bedelia.

But math is Alcolu's strong suit, and he suggests they make twelve pound cakes and stack them up. But when they follow Grace's recipe, they come out with enough batter for 13 loaf pans full.

"Baker's dozen!" says Amelia Bedelia cheerily, but when they stack all thirteen cakes up, number thirteen falls off and breaks into pieces

And the last item on Grace's note is a bit confusing.

"Make one crumb cake."

A crumb cake? Oh! So that's what the thirteenth cake was for! Amelia Bedelia packs the crumbs into another pan, adds a topping, and declares the crumb cake done, such as it is.

But there's still one more culinary challenge ahead for Amelia Bedelia, in Herman Parish's funny, punny Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off (I Can Read Level 2) (Greenwillow Books, 2016).

In this brand-new I-Can-Read paperback edition, Peggy Parish's linguistically challenged housemaid carries on with her tussle and tangle with the English language, earning heaping cupsful of snickers from young independent readers.

In this continuing series by the beloved Peggy Parish's nephew Herman, the half-baked housemaid is highlighted by the comic artwork of Lynn Sweat, who also illustrated some of the original Amelia Bedelia books (including one in which Mrs. Rogers requested a sponge cake and Amelia Bedelia made one with chopped up kitchen sponges.) But, this time Amelia's baking is not only edible, but a real winner, in a jolly ending to this merry culinary mixup. Some of Amelia Bedelia's doings may be a bit hard to swallow, but, as School Library Journal" says, "..."fans of the series are sure to eat this up."

Two Can-Can, Too! Cockatoo, Too! by Bethanie Deeney Murguia

COCKATOO.

COCKATOO, TOO?

COCKATOO, TWO?

What looks like an elegant tropical glade is really a word-play playground as a lonely cockatoo, and one more, too, become two. Yes, and a cockatoo can wear a tutu, and two can wear tutus, and two more in tutus can join the two cockatoos in tutus in a can-can.

Sure they can!

But what about a toucan? Can a toucan can-can, too?

Can a toucan in a tutu can-can? Yes, he can. But then, too, what about two more toucans in tutus? Can those two toucans can-can, too? Can they can-can two-by-two? WHOooo? asks a justly befuddled owl from the treetop.

And can two + two tutued cockatoos can-can like two + two tutued toucans can can-can? Can they all can-can to-gether?

Or can a little canary get the last word?

TOO-TOO MUCH!

Bethanie Deeney Murguia's Cockatoo, Too! (Little Bee Books, 2016) can do it all, with wonderful words that play with tongue-twisting homophone puns and irreverent rhymes amid illustrious illustrations that set it all off perfectly. Beginning with the front endpapers, delightful fronds of jungle greenery which resolve, optical illusion-style, into toucans, cockatoos, and perhaps even a canary or two, the artist proceeds with double-page spreads which reveal the stars of the show appearing slyly from the foliage to dance from page to page to the tune of a text that delights the eye, the ear, and the mind.

Murguia leaves only one question unasked: Can two cocks cock-a-doodle-and can-can in tutus, too?

Or, as Dr. Seuss* has his little straight man conclude...,

*Stop it. Stop it.That's enough, sir.
I can't say such silly stuff, sir.
                       --Fox in Socks

Wrong Turn! We're in the Wrong Book! by Richard Byrne

BEN AND BELLA WERE JUMPING DOWN THE STREET, FROM ONE SIDE OF THE BOOK...

TO THE OTHER.

THEN BELLA'S DOG JOINED IN...

AND ACCIDENTALLY BUMPED THEM BOTH OFF THE PAGE!

Ben and Bella (and her rambunctious dog) from Richard Byrnes' recent hit, This book just ate my dog! (see review here) are back for more bibliographic fun, as the kids are dragged, from recto to verso, from their sack race right into a new setting, this time a counting book.

"WHERE ARE WE?" SAID BEN.

"WE'RE IN THE WRONG BOOK!" SAID BELLA.

It's hard enough to be a character in your own book, but with an energetic pooch on the loose, you might find yourself vanishing from your opening page, right through the gutter (where the pages are sewn together) and find yourself biblio-confused. Ben and Bella are literally dragged through a counting book right into a comic book. The two are clearly in a bit of a bind in a book about the library, where the librarian gives them an opening in a book on Egypt. But hieroglyphics are not their favorite subject, and from there they have a puzzling time in a book of mazes, stay longer than they like with a wolf in old lady clothes, fold a paper craft boat to float away, only to meet a monster bursting through the next page. If only things would take a (page) turn for the better!

In his latest "under cover" metafictional adventure, Richard Byrne's latest, We're in the wrong book! (Henry Holt and Company, 2015) has a lot of fun with the reader's dilemma--which one is the right book for me! Byrne's illustrations are pleasant, but his illustrations and text lack the clever metafictional wit of Mo Willems' We Are in a Book! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) or Herve Tullett's Help! We Need a Title! and Press Here.

Carrot Stalks: Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds

JASPER RABBIT COULDN'T GET ENOUGH CARROTS...

And it's a craving that is easy to feed, since he walks right by Crackenhopper Fields on his way to school and baseball practice and back every day. Jasper rips them up, yanks them up, and snatches several every time he passes, gnawing and chomping on them with gusto.

... UNTIL THEY STARTED FOLLOWING HIM.

It's not just that he hears scary sounds, a sinister tunktunktunk, behind him on the way home after dark.

THAT NIGHT, AS HE WAS BRUSHING HIS TEETH, THERE THEY WERE!

In the mirror, Jasper sees three creepy, gap-toothed carrots peering malevolently from behind the shower curtain.

But when he whirls around, there's nothing on the side of the bathtub but an orange rubber ducky, a orange washcloth, and and a tall orange shampoo bottle.

The shape-shifting root veggies stalk him everywhere, always managing to morph into innocent orange objects--orange-handled hedge shears, an orange sand bucket, a discarded orange soda can. Obligingly, an obviously skeptical Dad helps him search the house for rapacious root veggies, with no results. His parents insist it's all nothing more than his overgrown imagination. But Jasper knows he's right!

CREEPY CARROTS WERE COMING FOR HIM!

Then Jasper comes up with a personal plan of action. Those vampire veggies can't come for him if they can't get out of their garden.

Jasper carefully measures their plot, builds a tall brick wall around the carrot patch, and digs a moat surrounding the garden--even stocking the moat with hungry (presumably vegetarian) 'gators.

WHEW!

Jasper feels safe and secure at last.

But Jasper is not the only one who is celebrating. Down at Crackenhopper Field, there's a partying group of secure carrots who now KNOW NO FEAR.

Artist Peter Brown, illustrator of Aaron Reynolds' Creepy Carrots! (Simon & Schuster, 2012) was awarded a 2013 Caldecott Honor Medal at last month's American Library Association Youth Media Awards for his clever tale of carrot stalkers.  Brown's Jasper is the usual rabbity kid character, shown in gloomy gray scale drawings, but his vindictive and vengeful carrots are cleverly comic, with just a trace of menace to them. Brown uses orange only for the carrots and their orangish alter egos, making this tale of possibly carnivorous carrots a mock-horror story of much wit and humor.