Imagine That!

A young bear named Lila has an adventurous spirit and a fertile imagination; Ismail (Christmas for Greta and Gracie) gives readers front-row seats as Lila turns ordinary routines into heroic escapades. “Lila, have you put your shoes on yet?” asks her mother as they prepare to leave the house. No response. “Lila, what are you doing?” she continues, which gets a “Nothing...” from her daughter. But a page turn reveals that, in Lila’s mind, her under-the-table wrangling with her shoes and their twisty laces is actually an underwater tussle with a giant octopus, which she describes in heroic verse: “I’ll fight this fearsome monster/ and soon he will regret/ not giving up much sooner to/ become my faithful pet.” The pattern repeats on a bus, on the street, and when they meet up with Lila’s grandfather (it seems clear that she inherited her imaginativeness from him). Ismail’s splashy watercolors plunge readers into Lila’s fantasies, whether she’s howling as her chariot races across the page or she’s terrorizing a city like King Kong—if King Kong had strings attaching his mittens to his coat. Ages 3–6. Agent: Vicki Willden-Lebrecht. Bright Literary. (July)