My Wild Family

Originally published in France, this book introduces “a very special family.” A human girl—surrounded by a lion, elephant, owl, and other creatures on the cover—describes her relatives without mentioning the obvious: each is a different animal. In a classroom, a bird perching on a chair is identified as “My little brother. Flighty and a dreamer, his head is often in the clouds.” On a city sidewalk, a giraffe strides among pedestrians: “My mother. Tall and beautiful, everyone notices her.” The girl’s “perfectly primped” aunt is a crowned crane, her cousins are monkeys scaling an electrical substation, and one of her friends is a cheetah dashing through a park. The closing image pictures the girl in a striped shirt, with a zebra’s ears and tail, emphasizing her own inner wildness. Working in linocutlike layers of brick red, ochre, blue, and gray, Moreau blends urban scenery with stylized patterns and organic leafy shapes. As his menagerie mingles casually with people on a beach, tram, and playground, he playfully obscures their true identities and implies how human animals—especially children—think about nonhuman ones. Ages 3–5. (Nov.)