MOLLY, OLIVE, AND DEXTER
You Can't Catch Me!
From the Molly, Olive, and Dexter series
by Catherine Rayner ; illustrated by Catherine Rayner
The intrepid trio, last seen in Molly, Olive, and Dexter: The Guessing Game (2024), return for a new activity, with potentially emotional results.
Molly the hare, Olive the owl, and Dexter the fox have a new game in mind: tag. Dexter slips behind Olive and informs her that she’s “It.” Deft of wing, Olive quickly tags Molly, who sets her sights on Dexter. When the two run a dizzying number of times around a tree trunk, he finds himself off balance and, worse still, slow. Dexter flags and finds he can’t best either Molly or Olive—Molly’s far too speedy, and Ollie’s an amazing flier. “What are FOXES good at?” Clever cunning is the answer there, and Dexter puts his brain to use to find a solution to his problem. Though everyone’s initially focused on winning, it’s Dexter in the end who assures his friends with a hug that “We ALL won, didn’t we?” The feeling of being left behind or less fast than others shines through and will strike a chord with young readers. Rayner’s idyllic watercolorlike illustrations supply a backdrop of pastoral scenes of fields and old stone walls. Tensions may rise, but these friends are always there for one another in the end.
The comfort of this gentle world happily outlasts every minor problem.
(Picture book. 3-6)