FRIENDS AND PALS AND BROTHERS, TOO

This is a dear piece of work, not least because it fosters congenial relations between brothers. Wilson’s easy, rhymed text has a pleasing bounce and echo—“I call him squirrel. He calls me bear. / We sing in bed. We mud our hair . . . . In spring we bring out balls and bats. / We look for frogs. We pet strange cats.”—but it plays as background music to Landry’s irresistible watercolors. He has drawn the boys with elemental features: dots for eyes, jug-handle ears and snug helmets of hair; their sickle-moon smiles and arms waving above their heads convey innocence and bonhomie. These guys are simply having a good time. And why not, when life involves eating handfuls of cake, tooling about on bikes, chomping on pancakes, jumping in leaves, spitting cherry pits and blobbing grape jelly on each other’s heads? Point taken: Make your own Eden, play hard, get dirty—why squabble when the alternative is to mud your brother’s hair? (Picture book. 3-6)