MUD IS CAKE

Richly colored, fanciful illustrations imbue Ryan’s (Mice and Beans, 2001, etc.) simple yet imaginative verse with all of the humor, wonder, and faith necessary for a phenomenal daydream in which anything is possible. Even before a word of the story appears, the brown-ink, bamboo-reed pen and watercolor illustrations on the title and half-title pages set the scene for the upcoming adventures. A woman reads to children in a big chair, surrounded by stuffed animals and a real dog; the children dig in the mud outside the house, with the dog licking at the puddle and the stuffed animals arrayed on the stoop. Once the verse begins, children, dog, and now life-sized stuffed animals are off on fantastical escapades featuring such transformed everyday things as a porch-turned-stage, a stick-turned-wand, a tree-turned-spaceship, tub-turned-boat, and the best and truest of all: a book-turned-door. The litany of favorite childhood imaginings, finishing with the exhilarating idea that “You can be most anything in dreams, or wide-awake. If you agree that juice is tea . . . if you believe that mud is cake,” combined with McPhail’s (Edward in the Jungle, p. 340, etc.) enthralling illustrations gives this work the makings of a future classic. (Picture book. 2-5)