GOOD LITTLE WOLF

This charming wolf is little and good—as is Andres’s book, for that matter—good enough to take a bath with his friends (lamb, rabbit, giraffe and teddy), to share his comforter and tell them stories (“Once I even dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood”), to sing them lullabies as he sails them over the moon, to pretend that he is big and bad. The text has a simple music to it, but the artwork is highly sophisticated, in a way that will win the wholesale approval of young readers. The line work is so fine it resembles etching; the colors are beautiful and, somehow, merry. Their droll warmth makes them immediately accessible as they give reality’s nose a good twist (Wolf’s bed morphs into his house, lamb dangles from the edge of an illustration during a chase) or just proceed on their bizarrely fascinating, not-really-going-anywhere way, with Wolf’s tongue all aflutter, his friends tipped upside-down in the bathwater, then hung out to dry on the clothesline. Kin to Scieszka’s A. Wolf? Maybe. (Picture book. 3-7)