Let's Have a Bite! A Banquet of Beastly Rhymes

Chocolate bunnies, crying crocodiles, and fortune-telling seals star in Forbes and Searle's companion to 2007's Beastly Feasts! There's no shortage of offbeat characters (who become even more so in Searle's kinetic cartoons), including a color-changing emu, a well-dressed narwhal ("In the summer he needs no topper—/ His groovy shades are a real show-stopper"), and a photogenic buffalo. But many of Forbes's rhymes feel tired or overwrought (" ‘My time, your dime—what's up Little Pup?'/ Biggie Dog said on the phone./ ‘Some slime did a crime, beat me up,'/ Said Little Pup, ‘and stole my bone' "), and the goofiness never especially clever. Ages 6–up. (Oct.)