Naughty Kitty!

Animal-loving Lily returns in this rambunctious follow-up to 2012’s Silly Doggy!, in which she mistook an escaped bear for a much-wanted dog. This story also involves a zoo escapee—a tiger—but Stower doesn’t rehash the plot: Lily is oblivious to the animal’s presence. As she leaves her new pet Kitty alone to eat, readers see an enormous tiger skulking in through the kitchen door. The animal raids the fridge and makes a colossal mess while Kitty looks on in alarm. Charm and humor radiate from Stower’s full-page and spot art, revealing the tiger just out of Lily’s sight while she chastises Kitty for a string of debacles. “I still don’t know how you stole all my sausages!” complains Lily in one scene, wagging her finger at Kitty with one hand while inadvertently feeding the slavering tiger behind her back with the other. The author executes the reader-knows-more-than-protagonist conceit with style, and Lily’s failure to notice that her backyard is filled with even more zoo runaways offers a hint of misadventures still to come. Ages 3–5. (June)