Monster Anxiety! Bad Kitty Scaredy Cat by Nick Bruel

Back in her first summer, when Bad Kitty was a kitten, she was audacious... brave...courageous... dauntless, even... fearless.. and kittenishly loopy, and muddled (but never mind those lapses). She was one tough kitty, a take-on-the-world kitty. Until... HALLOWEEN. It began with the doorbell

Ding Dong! Out of the darkness and into her doorway appeared the most horrible and frightening creatures Kitty had ever seen! TRICK OR TREAT! She saw... an Awful Alien, a Bizarre Bigfoot and a Creepy Clown....

On and on they came out of the night--ectoplasms, Frankensteins, even Uncle Murray borrowing candy, a parade of horrors, right down to a yeti and a zombie, made even more horrible by their relentlessly abnormal alphabetical order Bad Kitty freaked out! Gone was the carefree, casual, ever plucky Kitty!

She was a very, very scared, SCARED, SCARED little kitty.

Is the Bold and Brazen Bad Kitty gone forever? Or will Bad Kitty rally to Clobber the Clown, Flatten the Frankenstein, Maul the Mummy, and Whack the Werewolf? What do you think? Uncle Murray the Moocher hasn't got a chance in Nick Bruel's Bad Kitty Scaredy-Cat (Roaring Brook, 2019). Halloween hath no horrors compared to a Reconstituted Bad Kitty in which author-illustrator Bruel returns to the alliterative, alphabetizing wordplay wizardry born back in 2013 in his first best-selling picture book, Bad Kitty, There are many lovely and lovable kitty cats in literature, but only one Bad Kitty! Says Kirkus Reviews, "An origin story―-and alphabet practice and vocabulary stretcher―-for Bad Kitty's fans."

Lexicon on the Lam! The Great Dictionary Caper by Judy Sierra

THIS STORY IS BROUGHT TO YOU

BY NOAH WEBSTER AND HIS DICTIONARY

Talk about being IN ORDER! What is more orderly than a dictionary?

It's absolutely, awesomely alphabetical.

But although the dictionary arranges words alphabetically, words themselves are not, strictly speaking, orderly at all. They are definitely disorderly.

Remaining in place, words get restless. And restive. And rebellious.

They sit in the dictionary. Day in. Day out. It's time for a break.

Words march to a different drummer. And the onomatopoeia words can be cacophonous.

BEEP! BANG!

Action words can't stay put.

RICOCHET! SOMERSAULT!

Anagrams keep switching their letters' places.

And watch out for palindromes. They don't know which way they want to GO!

Rhyming words are persnickety employees; they only work when they can hang out with each other.

And those synonyms are major snobs! They often hang out together in their own exclusive place--an exclusive secret society called The Thesaurus.

And those interjections! They tend to be RUDE!

Author Judy Sierra is fond of rhyming text and a wizardess of wordplay, especially in her salute to these and other properties of the language in her The Great Dictionary Caper (Simon and Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books), in which the lexicon rebels in linguistic fashion. Sierra lets the lingo loose,but conscientiously corrals its characters in an appended glossary, itself a form of dictionary. Artist Eric Comstock's little pen-and-ink illustrations lets the letters run free, and kids will find plenty of winsome wordplay contained within these covers.

"Teachers will have field day with this wordplay; this caper is clever, capricious, and cunning," says Kirkus Reviews" starred review.