Forty the Fortune Teller

Dropped on the playground without making even one prognostication, Forty the folded-paper fortune teller feels purposeless—until she spots a big red bolt that has slipped out of a playground slide’s ladder. Predicting disaster, she enlists a smart-aleck potato chip also left in the schoolyard and sets out to return the bolt. Snappy dialogue and digitally finished pencil and gouache art follow Forty and Chip as they confront a series of goofy adversaries, each thwarted when Forty evokes one of the gleefully unfiltered fortunes a child has scrawled on her corners. (Told it will “marry your crush and go muah, muah, muah, kissing them all the time,” a storm cloud stops raining and whisks away a minivan.) And when hostile gum wads threaten the duo’s final approach, Chip shores up Forty’s confidence by declaring that her true strength isn’t fortune-telling—it’s “fortitude!” Reinspired, Forty rallies the gum wads as comrades in arms, replaces the bolt, and saves recess. Predicting that a teaming of Daywalt (Little Freddie Two Pants) and Cornell (What’s Scarier Than Thunder?) would result in a work that’s irreverent, sweet, and slides amusingly to its wrap-up? That’s fortune-telling 101. Ages 4–8. (Feb.)