Early Bird! Good Morning to ME! by Lita Judge

There is a cottage, a cozy cottage, where everyone is sleeping, everyone but ONE....

"GOOD MORNING TO ME!" SQUEALED BEATRIX.

Beatrix the parrot is an early riser, a very early riser. She's wide awake! She knows she's supposed to use her quiet, inside voice while others are still sleeping, but she just can't help herself!

Her patient but drowsy friend Mouse has no desire to salute the rising sun, but he bestirs himself to try to keep Beatrix from waking up the whole household. But this bird can't stop talking.

"I LOVE MOUSE! TODAY I WILL BE A GOOD BIRDIE!

OH, LOOK! THERE'S KITTY. I LOVE KITTY!"

Kitty is a grouchy Siamese who clearly does NOT love Beatrix or enthusiastic early awakenings. With eyes still half closed, her hackles are rising and her claws are already flexing.

But Beatrix is oblivious. Scatting the Jaws theme, she stalks Kitty.

"DAH-DUH, DAH-DUH, DAH-DUH....."

Beatrix moves in, and Kitty grabs with her clawed front feet. Suddenly the tables are turned.

"uh... MOUSE!!! (HELP!)

Mouse grabs a fork and gives Kitty a poke, and Beatrix escapes away to her perch. Kitty sits below, thumping her tail angrily on the floor. But to Beatrix it's all a good game of tag.

Suddenly she remembers that she hasn't greeted Goldfish yet. Enthusiastically, she sticks her head under the water into Goldfish's bowl. Bad move.

Beatrix falls in. Blub! It's crowded in there! Mouse has to run and wake Gracie the Bassett hound to pull Beatrix out of the goldfish bowl. It's a rough wake-up for Gracie, but, unfazed, Beatrix flaps her wet wings with glee.

"NOW WHAT CAN WE PLAY?"

Beatrix is not a good birdie, but her joie de vive is infectious in Lita Judge's giggle-fest-filled Good Morning to Me! (Atheneum Books, 2015). Judge's animal illustrations are joyfully comic, set in both framed vignettes on the page or spreading ebulliently across double-page spreads as full of life as her vibrant feathered heroine. This is a book that would be hilarious if you couldn't read a word of the text, with Beatrix and her buddies' facial expressions telling the whole story. As Publishers Weekly adds in their starred review, "... a lovely book... Judge uses aqueous, shimmering blues for her environments so that the furs, feathers, and marvelous expressions of her cast pop."

This is terrific picture book fun even if you, too, are not an early bird, one which will also resonate with night-owl parents who have a nest full of early risers. It's a book worthy of pairing with that classic tale of sleep disturbed, Audrey and Don Wood's The Napping House.

Souper Chicken? Beautiful Yetta by Daniel Pinkwater

Yetta, beautiful Yetta, brave and clever, will not be soup.

She will not be roast chicken on Friday night.

She is free. She is in Brooklyn.

When Yetta flees Mr. Flegelman, chicken rancher, just as she is about to be delivered into an unpromising future at Phil's Poultry World, she finds herself in another world, the mean streets of Brooklyn--obviously outside the ordinary purview of organic poultry.

But Yetta is brave and clever, and after battling buses and repelling dangerous rats whose intentions clearly are not benign, she is even insulted by the portly pigeons she approaches in hopes of sisterly avian assistance:

"Go back to the farm, silly hen!"

Then Yetta's attention is diverted to an unfolding street drama before her. A strange little green bird is about to become the end product of a successful stalk by a dangerous-looking cat.

"GAY AHVEK, DU FAHRSHTUNKEHNEH KAHTZ!"
("Go away, you stinking cat!") Yetta yells.

The cat may or may not understand Yiddish, but it certainly gets the message, as a large, white bird, wings flapping and beak snapping, bears down on it.

The cat skedaddles and Yetta is a heroine! Eduardo, one of the famous wild parrots of Brooklyn, invites her back to join his flock and shares the tale of his heroic rescue.

"YO AMO ESTA GALLINA!" ("I love this beautiful chicken!") says Eduardo.

"POR FAVOR, QUEDATE CON NOSOTROS, GALLINA HERMOSA!" ("Please, stay with us, beautiful hen!") say the wild parrots.

Daniel Pinkwater's latest, Beautiful Yetta: The Yiddish Chicken (Feiwel & Friends, 2010), provides both a rousing tale of a hen who dodges becoming dinner and a group of environmental expatriates who find a common cause in survival in the big city. Yetta chases cats and Eduardo shows her how to procure the best pizza crusts, and the streets of Brooklyn are made safer for Yiddish hens and Hispanic parrots.

With speech bubbles in Yiddish and phonetic English for Yetta and in Spanish and phonetic English for the parrots, reading this one aloud is a picnic in the park (or a fiesta in Flatbush), one that lends itself to exuberant retellings. Long live Yetta, the Yiddish hen. You go, girl!

Fly Away Home: Time to Fly by Laurie Halse Anderson

Suddenly Sneakers runs to the edge of the deck and barks at the oak tree.

"Sneakers, what's gotten into you? Are you defending me against a tree?" I glance up--and catch a flash of blue between the green leaves.

Of course, everyone else is inside, so nobody sees the parrot but Sneakers and me. And Socrates the cat. He stares up at the tree, too, his tail twitching.

The parrot flutters to a higher branch, then perches and looks down at me. Suddenly he lets out a loud "Braaaak! Phone home! Time to fly!"

At first Zoe has a hard time convincing Dr. Mac and the other Vet Volunteers that there is a flock of wild parrots --and one blue-capped talking parrot as well--in the Pennsylvania backyard of her grandmother's veterinary clinic. But soon the whole group is busy googling feral parrots and trying to come up with a way to return the obviously lost talking bird to its owner.

At last a chance to capture the lost pet presents itself, and Zoe is distressed when her attempt to catch the parrot she names E.T. results in a broken wing. But her grandmother Dr. Mac treats the bird and assures Zoe that the little parrot will be mended with a few weeks of care in her clinic.

But then Zoe gets a surprising phone call from her mom--the actress who left her with Dr. Mac almost a year ago when she set off to Hollywood to try to find work in the movies. At first Zoe had grieved over the loss of her mother and her familiar home in New York City, but now--with the love of Dr. Mac, her cousin Maggie as her best friend, and the fun of being with the other vet volunteers at school--Zoe has to admit to herself that she resents her mom's sudden intrusion into her happy life in Ambler and her plans to take her to L.A. to start a new life together.

That night in bed I can't seem to fall asleep. Watching the curtains move in the warm spring breeze, I can smell spring. I smell the rich green smell of the earth coming back to life. New York never smelled like this at night. I wonder, what do L. A. nights smell like--car exhaust? How can people there enjoy spring when they never have winter?

A scene from one of my favorite movies pops into my head, The Wizard of Oz. Mom and I must have watched it a thousand times. It's that scene when Dorothy closes her eyes, clicks her ruby slippers together, and murmurs over and over, "There's no place like home," as she waits for the magic to take her home where she belongs.

But where do I belong? Where's my home? I don't even know anymore.

Zoe and her mom have some serious work to do to come up with a plan to ease Zoe's transition to life in L.A.--before, like little E.T., it's her time to fly, but then, making transitions is the over-arching theme of Laurie Halse Anderson's Vet Volunteers series. As in the other books in this series, animals in need figure strongly in the plot of this new edition of Time to Fly #10 (Vet Volunteers), but dealing with the changes that come with life and growing up is the real subject of the novel, handled realistically here by a skillful and sensitive author.