Circle Square Moose

Having thoroughly disrupted an alphabet book in Z Is for Moose, Bingham and Zelinsky’s enthusiastically in-the-way quadruped has his way with a primer on shapes. Bingham gives the unseen narrator a sickly sweet tone, complete with predictable rhymes, though Moose’s interruptions (such as eating the sandwich used to demonstrate as a square) quickly raise hackles. “You are ruining the book. This is a book about shap–” begins the narrator, before another new arrival, the referee Zebra from the previous book, pops in, resulting in a metafictional chase that has the animals “crinkling” pages, getting tangled in acres of ribbon, and falling down a hole into a sort of picture-book void. It’s wild fun, and adults could probably even use the book to explore shapes with children, if they can get them to stop laughing long enough. Ages 4–8. (Sept.)