(3) K-3 Illustrated by John Martz. It sounds easy enough: "STEP ONE / Fill the bathtub with warm water." But nothing goes right for the girl demonstrating how to bathe her cat: the tub overflows ("OOPS!"), the cat runs away, etc. On it goes until, in a hilarious rebuke to the book's premise, the cat demonstrates one-step self-cleaning. Martz's tidy illustrations foreground each disaster's slapstick essence.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) K-3 Illustrated by John Martz. Straight man Abbott is a tall brown bear and befuddled Costello is a short white bunny in this picture-book adaptation of the 1930s comedy routine. Martz alters the text very little and includes speech balloons, panels, and changing perspectives to maintain the story's pace and add clarity for young readers discovering this famous baseball comedy sketch for the first time.

Reviewer: Cynthia K. Ritter

(4) K-3 Illustrated by John Martz. "Black and bittern was night, / that Halloween night, / when skul-a-mug-mugs / spled out skellety fright." In nonsense verse that's part Dr. Seuss, part Lewis Carroll, Heidbreder describes how a mob of invading skeletons are vanquished by the town's child trick-or-treaters. Cartoony illustrations capture the night's events capably, but it's difficult to find the sense in the text's nonsense.

Reviewer: Martha V. Parravano

(4) K-3 Illustrated by John Martz. In his flyary (diary), Frazzle records all the quirks and noises of his new spaceship, which also signal the inevitable: breakdown on the flyway (highway). Rather than trade it in for another model, Frazzle just replaces the engine. A clever invented alien vocabulary and superfluous diary format pad what is otherwise a thin plot about loyalty. Alien-filled retro illustrations are engaging.

Reviewer: Rebecca Reed Whidden