TUTUS AREN’T MY STYLE

Emma, whose immediate literary ancestors include Pippi Longstocking and Eloise, is flamboozled when the mailman brings a package from Uncle Leo and it’s a ballerina outfit. Emma’s taste runs more to pirate hats and lizards, but she gamely tries to float and flitter, following the advice of the mailman and stuffy Mrs. Gurkin with bumpy results in the out-of-doors. Inside, supplying her own music with a kazoo, she fares little better, but when Uncle Leo arrives she rolls like a tumbleweed, does cartwheels and taps in her cowboy boots. He’s delighted—and nonplussed, because he meant to send her a safari outfit! Wilsdorf’s watercolor-and–China ink pictures have a lively line, spreading out over double pages and employing sequential vignettes with equal assurance and verve. If the message is a little heavy handed, leaping cats, a peripatetic garden gnome and the red-cowboy-booted Emma’s irrepressible bounce lift it up. (Picture book. 4-7)