(3) PS Illustrated by Gerry Turley. It's dark and warm in the den while winter descends outside. Northern lights appear, a wolf cries, and a mama bear and two newborn cubs sleep peacefully. The spare rhyming text and illustrations (a combination of drawing and screen printing) follow the cubs through their first year and beautifully evoke the animals' relationship with the earth and with each other.

Reviewer: Nancy Sheridan

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Adam McCauley. A UFO touches down in search of barbecue; the book's cowboy narrator is happy to oblige the extraterrestrials and even consents to their request for a fiddle tune ("Greenies two-step mighty hard; / they wear a hole plumb through my yard"). This pointless rhyming fun features retro-style cartoony art that will make adults recall aliens from films of the 1950s.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(4) K-3 Illustrated by Paul Meisel. Papa, Mama, and Baby Bear go trick-or-treating, visiting various woodland creatures. Exploring (uninvited) a "very scary house," they wreak mild havoc, then hide upstairs when the owner returns. Meisel's acrylic and gouache illustrations are warm rather than scary, with Mama and Papa a constant reassuring presence. The Goldilocks role reversal, while inspired in theory, is muddled in execution.

Reviewer: Claire E. Gross