SURPRIZZE!: Fly Guy's Big Family by Tedd Arnold

A BOY HAD A PET FLY. HIS NAME WAS FLY GUY.

FLY GUY COULD SAY THE BOY'S NAME, "BUZZ."

One day Buzz heads outside, hoping to play with his buddy Fly Guy.

He finds his friend glumly drawing pictures of his long-lost family.

"I BET YOU MISS THEM," SAYS BUZZ.

"YEZZ!" SAYS FLY GUY.

Buzz has an inspiration. He decides to plan a surprise reunion for Fly Guy's family. He knows just where to place his invitations. He creates lotz of posters and puts them up around neighborhood garbage cans and at the town dump. The local flies see the signs but they are a little wary of assembling together in one place. It could be a DISAZZTER!

"SWATTERZZ?"

Buzz promisez that his party will be a swatter-free zone.

And Buzz plans for plenty of refreshmentz suited to guestz of the garbage persuasion. A garbage truck drives up and dumps a pile of genuine garbage in his front yard. Swarmz of guestz begin to azzemble! When his friend Fly Guy arrives, he yells:

"SURPRIZZZE!"

Fly Guy is almozt overcome. He tearz up as he cries...

Buzz's on-the-fly family reunion is a big SUCCEZZ!

The guestz chow down on the awful offal, and the putrid picnic is perfect for his clientele, who stuff their facez with moldy morsels and even take care of the cleanup dutiez. And Fly Guy's parentz even prezent him with a framed portrait of him as a cute little pazzifier-zucking larva.

Fly Guy gives Buzz a high five and and sincere THANKZ, BUZZ! in noted author-illustrator's seventeen title in his Fly Guy series, Fly Guy's Big Family (Fly Guy 17) (Scholastic Press, 2018). For kids who need to brush up on their beginning reading skills, it's Fly Guy to the rescue. Arnold makes the early reading lots of fun in the best tradition of its creator, Dr. Seuss, making sounding out sounds part of the fun in this laugh fezt for the cognozcenti! It's a noxious nosh to remember, or, as Kirkus Reviews quipz, ""Readers will agree it's the least a boy could do for his buzzom buddy."

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!"