PECORINO’S FIRST CONCERT

Sure, Pecorino Sasquatch is silly. He has a silly name and he does traditionally silly things, such as wearing shorts in the cold. And sure, the storyline is silly: It stars a boy who attends his first concert with his mother, crawls into a tuba and gets stuck there until he’s blasted out by a long-mustached musician he’s just insulted on the bus. The language and character names are silly, too, and will delight readers who revel in wordplay—the indignant long-mustached man “fumphers,” and then becomes “furmuzzled.” Flutes sound like “Whistle, wassle, woooooo.” Perhaps the silliest and best twist of all is that in every spread, the reader can see a large raccoon accompanying Pecorino in his adventures, but the creature is never, ever mentioned, even as both of them are clearly flying out of the tuba. Cantone’s scritchy collage illustrations, accented with bits of cotton and small photographs, perfectly fun-mirror the eccentric, googly-eyed, huge-nosed, projectile-breasted characters that inhabit Pecorino’s silly, silly world. (Picture book. 6-8)