Hot Dog

Pets with personality-plus fill these photo-illustrated board books. Beginning with the orange tabby sporting shades on the cover of Cool Cat and the panting bulldog cover model on Hot Dog, both volumes offer a portrait gallery of playful posers captioned with a short, rhyming text. For the sequence ""Witty cat. Pretty cat. Always loving kitty. Cat,"" for example, ""Witty"" features a Siamese squinting through a pair of plastic Groucho Marx glasses cum rubber nose; ""Pretty"" shows a snow-white, long-haired kitty wearing a pink bow; and ""Always loving"" presents a blue-eyed girl snuggling with an equally blue-eyed feline. A ""country dog"" poodle boasts a horned, black-and-white felt cow hat, while its more sophisticated sibling, the ""city dog,"" stretches out on a sidewalk, gazing impassively from beneath a perfectly styled wig. Though not as chic as William Wegman's weimaraners, these merry mannequins will win plenty of hearts. Ages 6 mos.-4 yrs. (May)