GRANNY REX

When a hawk threatens, Dee the chickadee takes a cue from her “sixty-million-times great-great-great-grandmother.”

Echoing beleaguered children everywhere, little Dee complains that she doesn’t like being small—whereupon her Mama informs her that she is descended from a monster with “BIG CHOMPING TEETH,” a “MASSIVE CRUSHING TAIL,” and an enormous “ROAR” and that even though the world has changed over time, she still has her monster ancestor’s bones and feathers. Confidence restored, Dee slips through the pushy bigger birds clustered around the feeder to chow down, adroitly avoids a red tailed hawk’s snapping beak…and then, seeing the hawk heading for a nest of defenseless hatchling jays, screws her courage to the sticking place and utters a tree-shaking “CHICK-A-DEE-DEE-DEE!” Is that enough to scare off the hawk? Presumably so, though viewers will have to fill in that part for themselves, as Henderson just switches to a closing view of the preening avian mite. Looking like painted paper collages, the illustrations add bright notes of brushed and overlaid color in depictions of both contemporary and prehistoric scenes.

Chirpy reassurance that size doesn’t matter, even if we can’t all be descended from dinosaurs.