THE BEST CLASS PICTURE EVER!

It's picture day for Class 202—a group of second graders so incorrigible that no one will teach them—and the sudden disappearance of the classroom hamster, Elvis, offers an excellent excuse for disorderly conduct. "Quickly the search began. Shirts came untucked. Ties dropped off. Barrettes flew from heads." But one student, Olivia, is too despondent for monkey business. "We don't have a teacher," she tells the photographer, Mr. Click. "And now we don't even have a class pet." As Mr. Click tries to coax her smile by getting the class to come up with words funnier than "Cheese" (the list includes "hiccups," "feet" and "moustache"), the kids undergo a remarkable transformation from rascals to enthusiastic, well-behaved learners. When the ducktailed Elvis reappears (observant readers will have already spotted him lurking in many of the previous pages), it's icing on the cake—the real treat is that Mr. Click is hired as 202's new teacher. The poker-faced prose that injected the humor into Roche's Little Pig Is Capable is back in force here. But her neon-bright gouache illustrations mark a departure from her customary tableaux. While her style is still unmistakably naïve, it's animated by a new level of energy and movement; as a result, when she writes, "Children rolled down the aisles, raced up the curtains, and kung fu kicked off the stage," the pictures bubble with a gleeful, school-age savagery. Ages 4-7. (Sept.)