WOULD I EVER LIE TO YOU?

A young narrator afflicted by an older relative with a fondness for playing head games finally exacts sweet revenge. Cousin Ed mixes fact and fancy so artfully that even his most outrageous claims—“When Ed and I were at the zoo, / Ed said, ‘That monkey looks like you! / When you grow up you’ll live here too. / Don’t cry, I’ll come and visit you.’ ”—are hard to discount, and so when he warns that a luscious slice of blueberry pie is poisoned . . . well, what if it really is? Crowding the foregrounds with their big, freckled moon faces, Ed sports beneath a shock of red hair a disingenuous grin that contrasts comically with his victim’s running expressions of worry and dismay. In the end, though, it’s Ed who looks poleaxed, when the narrator resolutely takes a bite of pie—and proceeds to “die” horribly on the kitchen floor. A broad and less-strange alternative to Chris Van Allsburg’s Probuditi! (2006), this offers just deserts for pranksters everywhere. (Picture book. 7-9)