TAKE CARE, GOOD KNIGHT

Thomas takes the characters from her winning easy-to-read series and enlists the help of artist Meisel to turn them into picture-book successes, with pleasing results. The Good Knight is again keeping an eye skinned on his charges, three little green dragons. The dragons have agreed to care for the old wizard’s cats while he’s away. The glitch: They can’t read, so the note left by the wizard with instructions on the cats’ care has to be crudely interpreted for visual clues. The dragons make a hash of it. The note has three rebuses—for water, food and sleeping arrangements—and the dragons get them exquisitely wrong: taking the cats for a swim at the lake (give plenty of water), packing them into the cupboard (feed food from the cupboard) and taking them camping (put them to bed). Fortunately, the Good Knight is there to save the day. Merry, repetitious wordplay and the illustrations—their scribbly lines fitting the harried, bedraggled cats to a T—will keep listeners pegged to the page. (Picture book. 3-6)