MY LAST CHANCE BROTHER

In this bellyaching monologue, a child presents a litany of offenses to justify his birthday wish that prankish older brother Gordon turn into a bug overnight. Though the narrator’s no paragon of virtue himself, Gordon does come off as the big brother from hell—jolting his younger sib awake in the morning, playing on his fear of spiders with a multilegged gift, “accidentally” dropping his toothbrush into the toilet—and so forth. Davis (Marsupial Sue, 2001, etc.) crowds the foregrounds with pop-eyed, large-featured cartoon caricatures, and even though a good deed does put Gordon in a slightly better light at the end, there are hints at the close that here’s one birthday wish about to come true. Though this describes a less nuanced relationship than Polacco’s My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother (1994) or Kellogg’s Much Bigger Than Martin (1976), it may persuade feuding sibs to lighten up, at least temporarily. (Picture book. 6-8)