The Wise Pickle

With a briny wit, Howden (The Tunnel) and Hahn (I Am a Dragon!) offer up a sly parable suggesting that radical acceptance can be goofy, profound, and green. When a pickle drops from the sky onto a sidewalk outside a dry cleaner, local wildlife—a rat, a bird, a chipmunk, a mouse, an earthworm—gather around it with earnest curiosity. After it begins offering existential observations about its life, they proffer a pillow and ask big questions: “Do you ever get bored?” “Why are we here?” As the pickle shrivels in the sun, its answers prove comically gnomic (“Purposes can change”). It draws its philosophy from experiential knowledge: sprouting as a seed, floating in an environment “like the sea, but with more garlic,” then being “served beside a hot dog to a person... who hated pickles.” Against what might otherwise feel like heady fare, minimalist pencil and watercolor vignettes give the world a humorous calm—the animals are sweetly attentive, and the pickle’s wide-set googly eyes radiate a disarming serenity. As the wind-down turns into a smartly plotted loop, chaotic comedy lands the ending somewhere between ridiculousness and enlightenment. Full of tangy absurdity, it’s a picture book fit to be relished. Ages 4–8. (June)