If the S in Moose Comes Loose by Peter Hermann (review)

Jaunty rhyme tells the story of Cow, left with only a sad MOO after the S and E come off of her pal MOOSE. Cow’s an ingenious sort, though, and she prepares to stick them back on with some glue—until she realizes she’s out of glue. When she seeks to borrow letters to put together GLUE in order to put together MOOSE, she ends up in a chain of letter-swap bargains and shifting identities that transform a bear to an ear, a goat to a boat, a lake to a cake, and so on, until she finally manages to reconstruct her buddy the moose. The premise recalls Escoffier’s Where’s the BabOOn? (BCCB 1/16), and Hermann brings an extra helping of high-energy silliness to Cow’s pell-mell procession. Cordell’s line and watercolor art is zippy perfection, his familiar loose-limbed scribbles adding a sense of barely contained chaos as Cow bipedally scampers through the scenes. The letters appear as weighty solid blocks, sometimes with legs, and shift seamlessly from label to character and back again. This is orthographical humor at its best, and it could inspire a freestanding swap-one-letter game once the book closes.