Bob, Not Bob!

Little Louie doesn't need his mom "every minute of the day." But when he catches a cold--his nose is clogged, his ears crackle and his brain feels full ("He didn't know of what")--he doesn't want to color or watch TV or even shoot baskets with wadded-up tissues. All he really wants is his mom. He tries to call for her, but his nasally voice can only wail "Bob!" Then, because his big black-spotted dog happens to be named Bob, it's the pooch that comes bounding "[a]nd slobbering," ready to play. Frustrated and sapped of energy, Little Louie flops and moans in a manner familiar to anyone who has ever spent time with a sniffling, sneezing family member. Luckily, his mom knows just what her miserable boy needs: her undivided attention and an afternoon of snuggling.

In Bob, Not Bob! authors Liz Garton Scanlon (The Good-Pie Party) and Audrey Vernick (Brothers at Bat) and illustrator Matthew Cordell (Wolf in the Snow) form a perfect team to capture the woeful state of a kid with a rotten cold. The agony Little Louie feels as he tries to pronounce words through his "weird, all-wrong, stuffed-up nose" is palpable. "NO! I wan by BOB, not BOB!" (Keen-eyed readers will notice that a heart forms the center O in "Bob" the mom, textually differentiating the word from Bob the dog.) Cordell's slap-happy watercolor-over-pen illustrations are wonderfully reminiscent of Quentin Blake's art. Bob, Not Bob! will have kids and their chicken-soup-bearing caregivers laughing aloud. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

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