MRS. MCGEE’S COCONUT

A runaway coconut stirs up worldwide mischief. It all starts when Mrs. McGee, a colorful figure with wild hair and a bright flowered skirt, buys a coconut. Back home, she can’t crack it open, even with a golf club; it goes bouncing down the hill, breaking up a tea party and boinking a cat named O’Mally on the head. Just as the coconut bounces through a bowling alley, Mrs. McGee hops onto her motorbike in hot pursuit. Before she can catch it, the coconut bounces onto a ship bound for Kashmir, where a monkey snatches it and easily cracks it open by dropping it from a high branch. Back home in Tennessee, Mrs. McGee contemplates the bag of walnuts she’s just bought. The rhyming text rollicks well enough, though it has to strain for scansion on more than one occasion. Geographically savvy readers will also wonder what happened to the coconut’s headlong career during the long voyage from Tennessee (via the Mississippi, one assumes) to landlocked Kashmir. A breezy escapade, decorated with loopily eye-catching illustrations from Cottrill, this defines “additional purchase.” (Picture book. 3-6)