FLY WITH THE BIRDS

A day in the life of an imaginative girl, told in singsong. Readers rise with her, get snarled in a traffic jam, go on a picnic, hoe a row, patrol the house, and slip off to bed. Each episode features a foldout page—full of labeled objects—that gives a fantastical twist to the last line of the verse on that spread: ``Stuck in the traffic/we creep and we crawl,/Buses and cars hardly moving at all,/So closing my eyes,/I say/two magic words/Hey, presto! A bus that can fly with the birds!''). The rhyme is buoyant and lilting and readers are sure to admire a girl who'd rather go spelunking with moles than weed another inch of the garden, or who orders thunder, snow, and rain with her picnic instead of just soaking up the sun. Edwards (The Forest Child, 1995, etc.) makes his book almost insistently edifying, particularly when the items in each scene are laid out and identified; it fractures the whimsical wordplay. Kitamura's bee-busy, lighthearted illustrations prevent the exercise from becoming too professorial; his trademark clutter will keep children poring over the pages. (Picture book. 2-6)