THE RED WOLF

A canny seven-year-old princess and a trunkful of knitting wool bring down the house—or, more accurately, the castle tower—in this cleverly told tale. Locked up by her father to protect her from the dangers of the world, the princess Roselupin knits her magic birthday yarn into a fuzzy red wolf suit. "If the world's too wild for the likes of me,/ Then a BIG RED WOLF I'd rather be," she says. Becoming a red wolf so big she bursts right out of her tower, Roselupin revels in a day (and night) of freedom. But the next morning, in a development explained only in the illustrations, a thread catches on a twig and the princess's suit unravels. Captive again, the imperturbable Roselupin uses more yarn to knit her father "a rather mousy-looking pair of pajamas." The final picture shows a forlorn mouse in a crown gazing out the window as Roselupin runs to join a circle of children in the town square. Shannon's (Gullible's Troubles) antic mixed-media art will have readers howling, too; in one spread, the gargantuan wolf revels in a dazzling selection of baked goods offered by courtiers who seem lilliputian by comparison. The old-world castle town and the dark forest are the stuff of classic fairy tales, but Shannon's sly humor and resourceful heroine are eminently her own. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)