Milk Goes to School

Border returns with a pun-filled school-day drama, featuring the photographic dioramas he used in Peanut Butter & Cupcake and Happy Birthday, Cupcake! Milk—a carton of strawberry milk with wire limbs, a pink bow, and a glittery backpack—is starting school, but she’s having trouble making friends, especially with Waffle, who repeatedly insists that she is “spoiled.” Border packs the story with culinary wordplay (classmate Peanut “wanted to be the first astro-nut on Mars”), which will induce chuckles or groans depending on readers’ temperaments, and there’s much to enjoy in the school setting he’s constructed, where bent spoons serve as chairs and Goldfish crackers swim in the aquarium. But the story has little momentum, moving from one loosely connected vignette to the next, resulting in a rushed reconciliation among Milk and her classmates. Ages 3–7. (June)