ITTY BITTY

Itty Bitty may be the most aptly named pooch ever, but here he moves with inspiring confidence through normal-sized city and country alike. Puttering beneath towering daisies aboard a walnut-shell tricycle in Bell’s small, retro-style scenes, the stick-legged Itty Bitty comes upon a bone big enough to live in—once he’s gnawed out a door and windows, that is. Some furnishings then being in order, down the highway to town he drives. The department store’s full-size furniture draws a dismayed “Whoa,” but big signs point to the “Teeny-Weeny Department,” where he finds not only itty-bitty rugs and itty-bitty sofas, but itty-bitty books, too. In no time his new place “felt like home,” and in the closing vignette he nestles down in his new digs for a cozy nighttime read. Children will do the same with this terse, appropriately diminutive but definitive assurance that size really doesn’t matter. (Picture book. 5-7)