Read the Booklist review of ZOONI TALES: KEEP IT UP, PLUCKY PUP by Vikram Madan

With narrative unfolding (mostly) in buoyant speech balloons and set in brightly colored, cartoon- style panels, Geisel Honor winner Madan presents five short tales featuring a cheerful anthropomorphic dog and his (mostly) Australia-centered animal friends. In pairing words like kazoo/shrew and confused/bruised, Madan’s deft rhyming text combines satisfying predictability with zestful nuance (a tale about a lost shoe cleverly uses only words that rhyme with “oo”) but also spices up typical early reader vocabulary with more obscure choices like catacomb, kelp, and askew. Always lively, with varying degrees of drama—from the slapstick shoe search and a sloppy pancake-making fiasco to silly foot races with a collection of unlikely competitors, an unflappable recovery of a cat trapped in a bat-filled cave, and an inspired deliverance from being stranded after a storm at sea—the message in each misadventure is that optimism and teamwork can solve any problem. As the ever-chipper Zooni shows his friends old and new how to make the best of things, these cheerfully bouncy tales will certainly tickle emerging readers.

— Rebecca Thornburgh