City Pig

Green acres lure this porcine heroine away from an empty urban existence. Dolores has it all: a penthouse, a fuchsia convertible that matches her pink nose and ""a very important job and an office all her own."" Yet she suffers from ennui. Of all the mammals and reptiles in the city, she is the only hog. Her grouchy boss, a balding man wearing a bow tie and a scowl, sends her on a vacation ""to sort [her]self out."" Dolores's rest cure takes her to the country, where she sees other pigs for the first time: ""And every one of them looked really happy!"" Wallace (Think of an Eel) doesn't explain how Dolores climbed the corporate ladder but does describe her gleeful burning of bridges (the boss has replaced her anyway, with an alligator dressed like a femme fatale). In multimedia collage with rough strokes of pastel-hued paint, Monks (The Puffin Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry) depicts Dolores first as a bewildered city pig and then as a perky country porker shucking her cosmo garb and cell phone. In a closing spread, Dolores frolics in a limpid lavender pond while, far in the distance, clouds drip rain on sooty skyscrapers. Despite a nice outcome for Dolores, this escapist fantasy speaks more to grown-ups than to children, with its clich s of the lizard-infested city. Ages 4-7. (Mar.)