cover image WHERE IS COCO GOING?

WHERE IS COCO GOING?

Sloane Tanen, , photos by Stefan Hagen. . Bloomsbury, $14.95 (32pp) ISBN 978-1-58234-951-0

Coco the chick gets around—and her latest travels make for a breezy, effervescent picture book. First introduced in a humor book for women, Bitter with Baggage Seeks Same , Tanen's downy heroine—a bright fluff of yellow with a pipe-cleaner nose and wings, and a perky pink bow on her head—steals the show here as she takes plane, train and automobile on a mysterious adventure. Coco also entertainingly whizzes through town on a skateboard and rides her trike through Paris, all with her toy giraffe in tow, before reaching her surprising destination. Tanen's cleverly conceived chickdom dioramas suggest universal human situations, but also burst with the energy of the imagined life of toys. Hagen uses a blend of photography and digital manipulation that sparkles with whimsy. A precursor to such photography-rich projects as the I Spy and Look-Alikes books, this volume will have readers giggling and perhaps dreaming up scenarios for their own playthings. Ages 3-up. (Oct.)