THE WONDERFUL THING ABOUT HICCUPS

With help from a hippo and an accident-prone little sister, a child explains library rules in this bubbly debut from Meng. A sequence of linked events begins with an attack of hiccups, which, the narrator notes, makes people laugh—particularly in quiet places like the library. Hiccups can be cured by big surprises, such as finding a hippo in the tree outside the library—and hippos are good for transportation home, along with other things. And best of all, returning a stack of finished books that have been thrown, dropped, used as plates for ice cream, swallowed by a hippo and then vomited up (treatment that many actual library items evidently receive, as any public-library worker will attest) on time earns the reward of a library card. Pedersen’s lighthearted cartoons feature a big hippo, two expressively posed young patrons and a staid-looking librarian with the inner stuff to climb a ladder to the roof when, for instance, a little sister has to be rescued. Faintly reminiscent of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, this introduction doesn’t exactly model best practices, but it does state them in ways that children will laughingly absorb. (Picture book. 5-8)