The Fly

Readers get to be a fly on the wall—and the ceiling and the breakfast table—alongside a six-legged narrator who spends much of Horacek’s story trying to avoid a bright blue flyswatter that lands with a loud “FLAP.” The housefly can’t understand what all the fuss is about: “Look at him down there. He’s after me already and it’s only breakfast time,” it complains in an inverted scene that shows a redheaded, flyswatter-wielding boy sitting upside-down in a kitchen. Horacek (The Mouse Who Ate the Moon) has great fun spoofing fly behavior (“After breakfast, I do my exercises—156 times around the lamp keeps me fit”) and playing up the insect’s unawareness of its pest status (“Once a frog nearly ate me, then a bird nearly caught me. Both in the same day. Why?”). Lush mixed-media artwork makes cupcakes and cookies look tempting to humans and flies alike, and while the world is stacked against the fly, after it lands on the boy’s forehead, a die-cut flyswatter lets readers help whack the kid in the face with it—a small victory for a small hero. Ages 3–7. (May)