This unprepossessing tale of a cow with a toddler attitude teaches animal attributes as it goes along. Millie, a brown-spotted, gangly calf, secretly hopes to be the subject of an artist who shows up in her meadow one day. The painter, however, seems interested in all the meadow's inhabitants but her—which Millie ascertains by comically surveying her body after each new addition to the canvas. "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 skinny legs. That's not me, Millie thought." Pedersen (A Friend Like Ed) depicts the heroine with her head upside down, her wide eyes peering through her own stick-like appendages. (The subject, Millie guesses with a swish of her tail, is one of her friends, a purple spider.) Examining her long string-like tail, she determines that she is not the model for a painted image with "two tall ears and a fluffy white tail," either ("Mooooo! Must be Bunny!"). Still, as muses go, Millie is far from demanding. When she's not checking out the artist's progress, she frolics contentedly in an endearingly naïf-styled meadow, the thick ink outlines of her akimbo legs and smiling snout popping out of the crayon-limned, lime-washed hills. Then one day Millie spots something familiar in the painting: "Someone with a white body and brown spots, four legs and a long tail." Not only has she been immortalized, long eyelashes and all—she's the focal point of the painting. "Mooooo! Must be me!" she cheers. Ages 3-6. (Mar.)
