SQUIDS WILL BE SQUIDS

This latest bright, glib collection of tales irreverently updates Aesop-like fables as Beavis and Butthead might have rewritten them. Scieszka and Smith (Summer Reading Is Killing Me, p. 816, etc.) forego tradition by ditching standard animal characters for the likes of a squid, a musk ox, and an animated stick of beef jerky. The introduction explains that fables were a way people could “gossip about anybody—as long as you could change their name to something like ‘Lion’ or ‘Mouse’ or ‘Donkey’ first.” Some of the morals work (when Skunk, Musk Ox, and Cabbage argue about who smells, the moral is “He who smelt it, dealt it”); others are tags without the snap. In illustrations that are as fresh and eyecatching as ever, the goofiness is as enticing as junk food, the colors Fruit-Loop bright, but fables usually have purpose, not punchlines; without such purpose, this is just another joke book for the ’90s. (Picture book. 6-10)