Cuckoo!

Design aficionados will appreciate the typographical voices that rowf, baa, and oink their way through the latest from Roberton (Wanted: The Perfect Pet). In a wallpapered hollow tree, light-gray Cuckoo hatches next to two dark-gray siblings. The squat, egg-shaped babies share a hug with their dove-white mother. Yet when they open their mouths, everyone but Cuckoo sings, “Tootooweet!” in melodious, pink cursive script. Cuckoo clucks, “Cuckoo!” in school bus black-and-yellow. “It was all extremely confusing for everyone,” so Cuckoo goes “in search of someone who could understand him.” Drawing in a fine, penciled line, Roberton depicts a denatured city where pigs catch the bus and cows eat at a diner. Cuckoo cannot communicate with any of the animals, and when he tries studying their languages, his “Baa” is an incomprehensible “Buckoo Buckaa Caboo!.... His brain hurt from all the learning.” Bilingual readers and instructors may feel dismayed by this development, and although Roberton gives Cuckoo a happy ending, in which the bird befriends a toddler whose cuckoo-bird robot has broken, a gloomy sense of Cuckoo’s isolation and inability to communicate is what lingers. Ages 3–5. (Feb.)