My Life as a Chicken

In a rhyming memoir “as told to” Kelley (The Lucky Lizard), scrivener Pauline Poulet dodges a hungry farmer and other predators before finally making her way to a safe petting zoo. Pauline’s perils begin in a shadowy wooden barn, where she and her unhappy peers dispense eggs onto a conveyor belt. But eggs aren’t the only thing on the menu, for “round my roost I hear suspicious/ words like 'Chicken pie, delicious.’/ Has Farmer hatched a crafty plan/ to throw me in a frying pan?” Pauline scoots out via a hole in the shed, but soon encounters a ravenous fox and then a band of pirate cats. When her foes make her “flinch and flail,” and when she “face[s] the fearsome typhoon’s wail,” she solaces herself by clucking, “Pauline, prevail!” Like the heroine, Kelley’s couplets sally forth unstoppably; Pauline’s breathless narration amplifies each exhilarating twist and turn. Slack, in his children’s book debut, likewise dispenses with subtleties: Pauline’s popping pink eyes are aptly ovoid, her breast heaves and her brown feathers fly as her pursuers drool. Using a jewel-toned palette, Slack has created a grotesquerie of villains and settings that more than equals Kelley’s verse in its enthusiasm. In this manic epic, “life as a chicken” means one mad dash after another to avoid the dinner plate. Ages 3-7. (May)