You: A Story of Love and Friendship

King (Prudence Wants a Pet) draws a pup with gravity-defying ears whose best chum is a tiny orange bird; together, they cavort through this free-verse paean to friendship. With curlicue lines and gentle watercolor tints, King creates a winning series of scenarios to accompany his text. “The world is a colorful place,” he writes, “yellow, red, blue, and all other colors.” As each color is named, the dog paints it on an old gray birdhouse he finds, livening it up with paint (including a dab of purple on the bird’s beak). “The world is colored with big things, small things, and all sorts of things,” King continues, amid images of the duo peeping at a nearby city through a telescope and visiting with some tiny insects. “But the most colorful part of my world is... you.” Music and “exciting” things (like a dive off a ladder into a barrel) take center stage in two subsequent verses with similarly resounding punch lines. The text is good-tempered and reassuring, but it’s King’s pocket-size, whimsical characters that will endear his creation to readers. All ages. (Nov.)