"Josette Bobette and her rabbit, Pepette, lived at #9 Rue Laffette, Paris." So begins Painting Pepette, the irresistible story of a girl who is so attached to her stuffed rabbit she's convinced her portrait deserves a spot in the family gallery along with "grand-mère and grand-père."
She takes Pepette to Montmartre, to the famous Parisian square "where the best artists in Paris painted." A man who is Picasso (identified inside the front cover and in the author's note but not in the story itself) spots her beloved rabbit and exclaims, "THOSE EARS!" Amusingly, he proceeds to paint Pepette with two noses and three ears. The three-eared portrait is hilarious... and not to Josette's taste at all... "And Pepette had to agree." A man with a bicycle-handlebar moustache stops to gaze at Pepette: "Please, I must paint the very essence of her rabbitness!" This is Dali. His portrait of the rabbit shows her draped bonelessly over a block, and is too "droopy" for Josette... "And Pepette had to agree." Chagall paints a flying-cloud rabbit (but Pepette is scared of heights!) and Matisse makes her too... pink. In the end, Josette knows just what she needs to do to capture her rabbit's "wonderfulness," her soft gray, listening ears and heart-shaped nose. She has to paint the portrait herself: "And Pepette had to agree."
Claire Fletcher's comical, endearing pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations have a shimmering-melting quality that enchantingly enhances Linda Ravin Lodding's deliciously told story, a brilliantly accessible take on the nature of artistic interpretation. As Matisse tells Josette, "But through art we can see the world any way we want." Not to be missed. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness