SAKES ALIVE!

Giving new meaning to “cattle drive,” bovines Molly and Mabel lift the farmer’s keys one day and take the pickup for a joy ride. Barreling down country lanes—“They bounced along the bumpy road / at quite a frightful speed. / ‘What’s that sign say?’ Mabel asked. / But cows of course can’t read”—toward seeming disaster, the duo roars into town trailing a line of howling police cars, zooms through the Mayor’s garden, then screeches to a halt right outside the jail—where cheering onlookers declare it the best parade they’ve ever seen. Firehammer’s sweet illustrations, all rounded edges and still forms in pale, harmonious colors, capture the humor, if not the frenetic energy, of Wilson’s headlong verse odyssey nicely. Readers are bound to hope that these two cousins to the bovine troublemakers introduced by Doreen Cronin in Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type (2000) haven’t finished sowing their wild oats. (Picture book. 6-8)