PENGUIN AND THE CUPCAKE

Sticklers shouldn’t get distressed when they see Penguin and Polar Bear and Walrus on the book jacket; they’ll learn inside how animals who live so far apart can be in the same story. Penguin, tired of fish, has heard from a friend that the Northern Hemisphere has wonderful foods, such as cupcakes. So Penguin flies (in a plane)…a little too far north. “SNOW!?! It couldn’t be!” First he meets Walrus, who is on a kelp diet and doesn’t eat cupcakes. Polar Bear doesn’t eat cupcakes either, but he does eat meaty things like birds. Penguin decides it’s time to go home, and on the plane he sits next to a very nice lady who happens to have...a box of cupcakes! Spires’s funny, flightless creation is a direct descendant of Willems’s Pigeon in his direct address to the reader and desire to manipulate the truth. Several pages have sequential panels as well as jokey editorial notes on “notebook paper.” The watercolor animals are based on Spires’s finger-puppet line but have a laugh-out-loud charm all their own. (Picture book. 3-7)