MINNIE AND MOO AND THE HAUNTED SWEATER

Since she’s on a diet and only going to chow 11 of the dozen cream puffs in the box, Minnie—Cazet’s blond-shocked bovine—is going to give one to the farmer because it’s his birthday. To surprise him, she is going to hide it under his pillow. Moo—also bovine, but a tad less crazily impetuous than Minnie—is inspired to knit the farmer a sweater after a collision between a flock of sheep and a detachment of chickens carrying Elvis, the imperious rooster, in a sedan chair. The heap of sheep is stuck atop Elvis, and only knitting their wool away will uncover the fowl muckamuck. Working fast, Moo inadvertently, and unknowingly, knits Elvis into the sweater. The lumpy sweater squawks, sneezes, crawls about and even takes brief flight. Clearly, a haunted sweater. Cazet is up to his old but evergreen tricks in this latest Minnie and Moo debacle, fashioning a story of high entertainment value—dwelling in a world of supreme lunacy, yet with an agreeable dryness running through it—to keep a bunch of young noses stuck in the pleasure of a book, inhaling the words. What becomes of Elvis? Well, a rolling pin is involved. There is, after all, a weird bulge in the sweater. (Easy reader. 4-8)