Wolves

Emily Gravett

Wolves was an award winner overseas before finally getting published here in America, and it's easy to see why. This is a brilliant little book, funny and informative and supremely disgusting no matter what your moral stance. It's a must, especially if you've got kids.

A rabbit borrows a book on wolves (written, in true meta fashion, by Emily Grrrabbit) and reads it on his way home from the library, so absorbed that he never notices that the path has hanged under his feet as he's walking. It's the subtle things that make the first part of the book wonderful, like the way the rabbit's size decreases on every page as the danger gets greater and greater. Then comes the ending (and the alternate ending; the very idea of including an alternate ending in a kids' book is itself hysterical), and Gravett abandons the subtlety for slap-in-the-face humor that's actually funny.

I know I've said it many times in the last couple of years, as I've reviewed kids' books, but I'll say it again here: if most adult books were as well put together as the kids' books I've been running across, I'd have a lot less reason to be turning to kids' books to get a breath of fresh air. It often seems that the quality of kids' books these days is, on average, higher than that of adult books, which is truly depressing. But if you know where to look, you can mine the vein of kids' books for pure gold, and you find it in Emily Gravett.