PRESCHOOL TO THE RESCUE

In this mini-adventure, the grumpy villain is a deceptively deep puddle. The crafty mud first lures a pizza truck into its apparently shallow depths: "Slurp." Followed in short order is a police car—"Glurp." As more vehicles come to the rescue ("Blurp," "Flurp," "Plurp"), they all succumb to the muddy, sticky gunk and stuck they stay, but before the young reader can despair, it's "preschool to the rescue!" The perspective suddenly widens, and the viewer sees that the vehicles are toys. As they rush onto the schoolyard, each lively preschool animal is armed with a shovel or a Popsicle stick and they go to work extricating the little trucks. Once they have done that, they utterly vanquish the mud puddle by fashioning it into pies, pizzas, and cookies, getting wonderfully grubby in the process. Sierra (The Gift of the Crocodile, 2000, etc.) tells her chirpy story in repetitive prose as the puddle victims accumulate. Hillenbrand's (Kiss the Cow, 2000, etc.) illustrations are double-paged delights. The mud puddle is not merely brown, but illuminated by subtle hues of purple, blue, pink, green, turquoise, red, and orange while still retaining its essential muckiness (and two eyes and a nose). The preschoolers dressed in ultra-bright rain gear make it clear that a little mud never hurt anyone—in fact, it might even add to the fun. (Picture book. 3-7)