BEAVER IS LOST

When unflappable Beaver accidentally lands in the big city, he encounters challenges finding his way home. It all starts when he hops aboard a floating log and ends up on a logging truck heading to the city, where he’s chased by a dog, swims in a backyard pool, visits the zoo, escapes into a lake, exits through a culvert, emerges into a street, locates the river and swims home. The sparer-than-minimal text heralds Beaver’s arrival in the city with “Beaver is lost” and announces his return to his lodge with “Home.” The rest of Beaver’s saga unfolds entirely through Cooper’s splendid watercolor-and-pencil illustrations. Using a palette of blues, greens and browns, the illustrator tracks Beaver’s diminutive figure as he resolutely traverses an alien, urban landscape progressing unflaggingly from left to right across pages and through frames in his solitary, silent journey astride the log, atop the truck, across the pond, through the culvert and city crowds and, eventually, back into the river to swim home. Stunning in their simplicity, these pictures speak a thousand words. (Picture book. 3-7)