STANLEY AT SEA

Plainly unable to stay out of mischief for long, Stanley and his canine buddies embark on a third escapade after Stanley’s Party (2003) and Stanley’s Wild Ride (2006)—this one with cosmic overtones. Slouching away from his picnicking human family, Stanley joins Nutsy, Alice and Gassy Jack in sniffing out an unattended ham sandwich. They find it in a small rowboat that proceeds to carry them down the river and out onto the scary sea. Could they be on their way to the end of Outside? What will they find there? A fence, undoubtedly, because “sooner or later you always come to a fence.” Once again, Bailey endows her characters with believably doggy thought processes, and the pop-eyed, floppy-eared figures in Slavin’s textured paint-on-gesso scenes positively exude enthusiasm, if not intelligence. Soon a “fence” looms up, in the form of a freighter’s towering hull; the dogs are rescued, fed steak and sausage until they can barely move and then rowed back to land. The tale of how they found pooch paradise quickly becomes a legend throughout dogdom: “No dog has ever found that fence,” Bailey concludes, “but they think about it all the time.” The spiritual metaphor may need some explaining to children, but Stanley’s waggish appeal will win over readers young or grown. (Picture book. 6-8)