For Young Readers

Picture Books to Make You Laugh

Lauren Child's But Excuse Me, That Is My Book (Dial, $16.99; ages 3-6) revisits a trauma familiar to any little kid with a library card. Heading to the library with Charlie, her big brother, Lola is all agog. She plans to borrow, yet again, " 'Beetles, Bugs and Butterflies,' . . . the best book in the whole world." It's the best, she explains, because, well, "the bugs are quite buggy and the butterflies are really beautiful and the beetles are . . . very silly." Lola almost falls over laughing just thinking about the beetles. "And the beetle gets stuck! And his legs are very funny! And he can't turn over! . . . All his funny little legs, Charlie!" You know what's going to happen: Someone else has borrowed "Beetles," and Charlie has to save the day, fast. He does -- Charlie's a smooth talker -- but what stays with you is not the happy ending but Lola's perfectly rational passion for the book that makes her laugh.

Such picture books are "extra specially special," as Lola would say. They don't moralize. They don't gush or talk down. And if they educate or reassure, they do it obliquely. Here are a few more:

The Squeaky Door , a Puerto Rican folk yarn retold by Margaret Read MacDonald (HarperCollins, $12.99; ages 3-6), is laugh-out-loud hilarious. A little boy, staying over at his grandma's house, gets to sleep by himself in the big brass bed. He's cool with that. But after Grandma kisses him good night and shuts the door, the resulting "squeeeeeak!" scares him witless. So Grandma brings in the cat to keep him company. It's no good: The spooky squeak turns both boy and cat to jelly. And so it goes, as a dog, a pig and a horse join the jittery crowd in the bed, with increasingly cacophonous sound effects. Things are doubly bad for the cat, who now has to worry about the dog as well as the squeak -- an entertaining subplot that's limited to the pictures. But all of Mary Newell DePalma's illustrations are gems: I think Lola would particularly appreciate the cat's pink eyeshade and the horse's pajama-clad legs sticking every which way out of the bed.

Oliver Jeffers's Lost and Found (Philomel, $15;99; ages 4-8) is funny, too, but in a more ambivalent way. Just look at the comically solemn expressions of the two main characters in the picture that goes with the riveting first sentence: "Once there was a boy who found a penguin at his door." In places it's even heartrending. "The penguin looked sad and the boy thought it must be lost." In fact, it's amazing how sad the penguin looks, considering he's just a swoosh of black, a daub of white shirtfront, an orange triangle for a beak and two yellow dots for eyes. (How can two dots be so expressive?) But there are also his absurdly amusing little feet and the comedy inherent in the boy's earnest plan to return the penguin to his home. At the South Pole. In a rowboat. With a suitcase, and an umbrella in case of rain. Of course the penguin doesn't want to go home, which only results in more sadness, more comedy and an ending so sweet it hurts.

Fly, Little Bird , a not-quite-wordless picture book by new author Tina Burke (Kane/Miller, $14.95; ages 3-6) is similarly affecting, perhaps because it also stars a child and a homeless creature. A little girl, out picking flowers with her dog, finds a lost baby bird (parrot? macaw? anyway, it's green and yellow and has a comical red beak). "Fly, little bird," she tells it -- but oops. Not ready for that yet. So she pops the orphan in her basket and totes it home, where for a few idyllic weeks it joins her and the dog in their daily rounds: It gets fed, it gets read to, it gets to sleep in a box, it stays up late in a blanket tent, it records a song, it has its portrait painted. When, one day, it does fly away, that portrait comes in handy. What's so funny? Simple: the bird's blissed-out expressions.

The same pairing -- small girl, visiting bird -- gets equally witty treatment in Irene Haas's Bess and Bella (McElderry, $14.95; ages 3-7), with a text as gravely funny as the pictures. One cold winter afternoon, Bess and her doll are having a tea party with melted snow and cookie crumbs, but it's not going well. Things are as dull as the sky is gray, in fact. But then, falump! Something tumbles from the clouds. "It was a little bird fluffing itself, trying to stand up. Tiny suitcases were scattered everywhere." Bella has arrived, and she's not just a bird. She's a born entertainer.

Finally, there's Joyce Carol Thomas's adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's The Six Fools (HarperCollins, $15.99; ages 6-10), one of many Gulf state folktales Hurston collected in the 1930s. A young man is so alarmed by the silliness of his fiancée and her parents that he can't take it anymore. "I'm going traveling for a year," he says, "and if I find three fools as big as you, I'll come back and we'll get married." He does, and they do. Ann Tanksley's '30s-style paintings reflect the storyteller's obvious glee at the sheer range of human folly.

-- Elizabeth Ward