JUST TOO CUTE

Scoring middling-high marks for child appeal if not really delivering on the title’s promise, a veteran writer for The Simpsons offers two original tales about bad behavior followed by just deserts and another that celebrates thinking outside the (fashion) box. Separated by flights of “Animal Poems for Beastly Children” (“What is moister / Than an oyster? / Grampa’s Pamper / Can be damper”), the stories introduce an escaped New York seal so intensely “cutesy-wutesy, itsy-bitsy, chubsy-wubsy” that it gets away with stealing diamonds from Tiffany’s, running up a huge bill at the Plaza and like malfeasance until brought before a near-sighted judge; a bored penguin who decides to wear red rather than black and white and ends up liberating his entire Antarctic flock; and an “Appalling Polar Bear” who keeps eating fellow circus performers until he is in turn eaten by his annoyed agent. Yanok’s James Flora–style cartoons give the collection a suitably retro, tongue-in-cheek look. Readers hoping for some rougher cautionary mayhem will be disappointed, but try this on James Proimos fans. (Illustrated fiction. 8-10)