MY SCHOOL’S A ZOO!
by Stu Smith & illustrated by David Catrow
A lad’s world is transformed the morning after a zoo visit: his parents “snort and drool” at the breakfast table, the substitute teacher is literally a bear, the computers in the lab are swarming with giant “bugs” of the creepy-crawly kind, and so on. As in Dorros’s The Fungus That Ate My School (2000), Catrow’s lurid green-and-yellow scenes boil with action; each room the worried young narrator passes is filled with leering, overweight, self-absorbed creatures, all rendered in lovingly oogy detail. Not the most expert of versifiers, Smith sometimes inserts lines just to make a rhyme—“The lunchroom sure was crowded, / and the aides looked pretty mean. / The lions and the wildebeest / were causing quite a scene.” And there’s not much in the way of actual plot, either. Still, the general premise is a crowd-pleaser, properly wrapped up with a closing remark about an upcoming trip to a dinosaur exhibit. Uh-oh. (Picture book. 7-9)