Casey's (Beep! Beep! Oink! Oink! Animals in the City) sassy mixed-media collages invigorate this outing to a busy humane society. The author/artist combines a forthright first-person text ("Hello. My name is Patricia Casey") with watercolor-and-pencil illustrations jazzed up with photo cut-outs. In a composite self-portrait, for instance, she wears snapshots of Converse high-tops, while a photo of the shelter director sits atop his sketched-in body. The staff and the animals they care for (including William, a fox abandoned as a pup), plus their own pets, go about their business. They prepare food for the cat sanctuary, mend a pigeon's broken leg with lollipop sticks and return a deer to the wild. The stars of the show, of course, are the animals, a winsome assortment of both garden variety (dogs and cats) and the more exotic (a chicken, a hedgehog, a pony and a gecko). Visually syncopated layouts range from full double-spreads to stacked vignettes, all interspersed with chunks of prose on colored backdrops or scraps of ruled journal paper. Well-matched by the vivacious narration ("Roosevelt's tail is so short that when he's happy he wags his whole bottom"), the briskly paced artistic framework sets off the clever collages, which continually surprise and delight. Ages 5-8. (June)
