I LOST MY BEAR

Following her mother’s advice to “think like a detective,” a desperate child searches her gloriously cluttered room and everywhere else for her lost bear. Naturally, it turns up at bedtime—waiting under the sheets. Like Feiffer’s cartoons, this is not for short attention spans, as the search is prolonged and wordy; still, so intense is the child’s concentration that sometimes the background vanishes and she seems to burst out of the story to peer along the surfaces of the pages, and children, at least, will enjoy surveying the immense haul of toys, clothes, books, animals, and rubble littering the shelves, floor, and bed. An energetically drawn, comically exaggerated reprise of a universal domestic experience. (Picture book. 6-8)