Mister H

When a hippo named Mister H persuades a hesitant girl to unlock his cage at the zoo, his long-winded reasoning sets the tone for Nesquens’s (My Tattooed Dad) story: “No one will notice what you’ve done.... Don’t you see that everyone goes around doing their own thing, without thinking about their neighbor? The immeasurable selfishness of humanity. The great evil of the twenty-first century.” Once freed, Mister H embarks on a quest to find his African homeland, but it’s a rocky road: he becomes wedged in a turnstile (“That’s because you’re very fat, if you’ll pardon my saying so,” explains the zoo gardener), crashes into a storefront window, disrupts traffic, and offends restaurant diners. Lozano’s (Operation Alphabet) illustrations bring a chic midcentury aesthetic to this illustrated novel, but like Mister H, the story moves slowly, and a somber, ambiguous conclusion (“Step by step, he walked with the hope that someone would guide him to his home,” writes Nesquens, as Lozano pictures him walking off into the night) leaves readers as lost as the protagonist. Ages 7–10. (Feb.)