SCHOOL PICTURE DAY

A child’s urge to tinker brings her entire class to the brink of disaster—and, happily, back. Everyone starts out to school dressed in their best, but they take on an increasingly spotty look after Josephina Caroleena Wattasheena the First sprays them with oil while disassembling the school bus’s gear shift; with pencil shavings when she deconstructs the pencil sharpener; then water as she plumbs the sprinkler system’s mysteries; and finally soot from the bowels of the boiler. The rather twee photographer—“ ‘Everyone, say cheesy wheezy, if you pleasy’ ”—has troubles too, as he struggles to get the children together, only to discover that his camera is kaflooie. Sounds like a job for you-know-who. Wickstrom fills his cartoon classroom scenes with gap-toothed, square-mouthed grins, and gives his dark-skinned engineer-in-training both a tool chest and an expression of fierce concentration. Young readers, with or without a mechanical vocation, will laugh at Josephina Caroleena Wattasheena the First’s compulsive “fidgeting, fiddling, fuddling, and foodling,” as well as the decidedly unusual class portrait that ultimately results. (Picture book. 6-8)