Cousin Irv from Mars

Teddy is bummed out when his mother tells him that Cousin Irv is coming to visit from Mars (“We’re not close,” she says) and that he’ll have to share his room with his short, green, antennae-bearing relative. Cousin Irv breathes loudly and guilts Teddy into giving him his pillow: many doctors, Irv says, have told him that he carries “all his stress in his neck.” Although Cousin Irv sounds suspiciously like a middle-aged Borscht Belt refugee (“Those no-goodniks!” he exclaims about Teddy’s schoolmates), he earns the warm regard of the student body when he vaporizes everything in Teddy’s classroom with his electromagnetic ray—including the teacher. From that moment on, Teddy grows fonder of Cousin Irv, who “let Teddy eat pizza in the bath because he didn’t know you didn’t do that.” Kaplan (Monsters Eat Whiny Children) is a stylish, economical cartoonist, but his prose is responsible for most of the jokes, and there are laughs on every page. “I’ve had to go to the bathroom for days,” says Cousin Irv after his long flying saucer journey. Ages 4–8. Agent: Erin Malone, William Morris Endeavor. (June)