UNCLE BIGFOOT

A startled lad discovers that his seemingly ordinary family has some uncommon relatives when Uncle Bernie comes for a visit. Covered with hair, sporting humongous hands and feet and so tall that his arrival at the front door requires a foldout to depict, Bernie looks like . . . could he be? Though the boy’s parents pooh-pooh the notion, all the evidence points that way. Smiling genially and playing with the more accepting baby, Bernie cuts a comical figure in O’Connor’s cartoon pictures, thanks to outsized extremities, hilariously undersized clothes and a belly of truly gargantuan proportions. Eventually the anxious narrator is won over. “Some people are just a little more different,” he concludes—which leaves him looking forward, after Bernie’s departure, to an upcoming visit from “Aunt Nessie.” Parental readers as well as children old enough to wonder whether their own family trees sport some peculiar branches will be amused. (Picture book. 6-8)