Neil Gaiman, illus. by Adam Rex. Harper, $17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-06-201781-9
No wolves in the walls or button-eyed parents in this story about a baby panda named Chu. Yet Gaiman builds suspense from the enigmatic opening sentence (“When Chu sneezed, bad things happened”), which frames a portrait of the
roly-poly protagonist,
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Edited by Nick Healy. Capstone/Switch Press, $16.99 (232p) ISBN 978-1-63079-012-7
More than 40 brief true stories from Pete Hautman, Alison McGhee, Adam Rex, Jon Scieszka and others address a vast range of experiences and emotions that will be painfully familiar to teens or anyone who ever was one. Several stories, like Rachael...
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Adam Rex, Author . Harcourt $16 (32p) ISBN 978-0-15-205363-5
Marvelous hand-lettering and meticulous oil paintings hearken to 19th-century Barnum ads—or 1960s counterculture poster art—in Rex's offbeat (The Dirty Cowboy
) tale. The punny "tree-ring" circus of the title is not a big top,
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Adam Rex, Author . Harcourt $16 (40p) ISBN 978-0-15-205766-4
Lovers of silly pop-culture allusions will get a kick out of these monster spoofs. The title poem sets the parodic tone. Frankenstein's monster, pursued by torch-bearing villagers, feels sad to be despised: "They threw tomatoes,/ pigs,...
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Adam Rex, Author . Harcourt $16 (32p) ISBN 978-0-15-205817-3
A sort of Personal Shopper Dolittle, a zoo-going girl talks to the animals, but the novelty wears off when the pushy beasts send her on errands. She hears the first “pssst!” as she approaches the gorilla cage. “What's up?”
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Adam Rex, Author . Harcourt $16 (39p) ISBN 978-0-15-206235-4
With maniacal glee, Rex (Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich
) delivers spot-on rhymes about B-movie monsters, loosely organized around the nuptials of Frankenstein and his bride. An oil painting of the wedding cake is as creamy as a Wayne Thiebaud...
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Adam Rex, HarperCollins/Balzar + Bray, $16.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-192090-5
As vampires go, 15-year-old Doug Lee is an abysmal failure. Forever frozen as an overweight teenager, he's stumbling through his unlife. He can't seem to master his powers, can't score a quick nibble off a cute girl, and risks bursting into flames...
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Adam Rex. HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, $16.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-06-206002-0
Mythology and magic collide with breakfast cereal in this dry-humored adventure from Rex (Fat Vampire), first in
a planned trilogy. When sixth-grader Scottish Play Doe—who understandably prefers to be called Scott—moves to the small town of...
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Adam Rex. Chronicle, $16.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-4521-5443-5
Rex (XO, OX: A Love Story) takes the conventional wisdom of the title and runs with it. He paints hands, feet, and antic cartoon faces on photos of fruit, sets them against brown-paper-bag backgrounds, then imagines them improvising a bunch of Burma
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Adam Rex, illus. by Christian Robinson. Roaring Brook/Porter, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-59643-964-1
Every so often, a book comes along with a premise so perfect, it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before; this is one of those books. As a new school year begins, it isn’t just the students who have trepidations: the building doesn’t quite know
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Adam Rex, illus. by Scott Campbell. Roaring Brook/Porter, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-62672-288-0
She’s a famous, glamorous, and vain gazelle. He’s a salt-of-the-earth ox with a gift for plainspoken eloquence. Their journey toward romance is a rocky one, captured by Rex (How This Book Was Made) and Campbell (Hug Machine) through an epistolary...
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Adam Rex, Author, Adam Rex, Illustrator . Hyperion $16.99 (423p) ISBN 978-0-7868-4900-0
Who knew the end of the world could be so hilarious? With a misfit cast of characters led by a precocious 11-year-old narrator named Gratuity “Tip” Tucci and a bumbling alien named J.Lo who has an appetite for dental floss and air...
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Adam Rex. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4231-1920-3
Rex’s story begins and ends in sleep, and—although it’s never stated explicitly—seems to describe a dream. The narrator, lifted from the backseat of a car and put to bed, awakens to see the moon, glowing and enormous, floating in her backyard. “I’m...
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Adam Rex. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-4847-0951-1
Having saved the world in The True Meaning of Smekday (2007), Tip Tucci and her alien sidekick, J.Lo, decide to seek adventure on the new homeworld of the extraterrestrial Boov, located on a moon of Saturn. Upon their arrival on New Boovworld, Tip...
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Mac Barnett, illus. by Adam Rex. Disney-Hyperion, $17.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-4231-5220-0
Barnett and Rex concoct another self-referential story, this one about the process of bookmaking. As in Chloe and the Lion, Barnett and Rex star as writer and illustrator. With the help of an editor (“she is like a teacher, only she works in a...
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Kate Messner, illus. by Adam Rex. Chronicle, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-4521-7488-4
Messner (Chirp) and Rex (Pluto Gets the Call) open with a flyleaf bookplate that reads not “This Book Belongs to” but rather “This Country Belongs to.” It’s emblematic of their core idea that “the presidents of tomorrow are always out there...
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Adam Rex. Chronicle, $17.99 (56p) ISBN 978-1-4521-8154-7
Snappy second-person verse (“That’s the gum./ Right there./ That you got in your hair”) enumerates a family’s vain efforts to remove a blob of shocking pink bubblegum as Rex (Unstoppable) dreams up ever-grosser remedies for the hairy dilemma. The...
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Adam Rex. Roaring Brook, $20.99 (400p) ISBN 978-1-2506-2191-7
While running late for a final exam and biking furiously through her small town, white teenager Zelda narrowly misses being hit by a car and meets Langston, a handsome Black boy sprawled in the bushes. This meet-cute—and various encounters before it,
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Adam Rex. Chronicle, $14.99 (140p) ISBN 978-1-7972-1323-1
Rex (A Little Like Waking) deftly wraps big themes—friendship, honesty, justice, self-awareness—into an absurdly silly and heartfelt series launch chronicling a wee wizard’s quest to become a helpful hero. Cheerful-to-a-fault Gumluck the wizard is...
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Adam Rex. Dial, $19.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-593-69932-4
In this socio-emotional picture book, young Junior Junior finds a seemingly ideal friend in the echo that bounces off an adjacent mountain near his high-altitude home. When he shouts approbations such as “JUNIOR JUNIOR IS THE GREATEST IN THE WORLD!”
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Adam Rex, illus. by Laura Park. Chronicle, $16.99 (56p) ISBN 978-1-4521-6504-2
A put-upon crab and a crow—drawn by Park (Abner & Ian Get Right-Side Up) with an adorably goofy graphic aesthetic—realize that by combining the crow’s wings and the crab’s pincers, they can become the airborne scourge of their common enemy, a cat. “C
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Adam Rex, illus. by Laura Park. Chronicle, $16.99 (76p) ISBN 978-1-4521-8386-2
If Alexander Hamilton can have his own hit musical, why shouldn’t the digestive system, too? The protagonist of this picture book is round, bright pink ingenue Li’l Candy, “junk food” with a “heart of gold,” who dreams of being eaten. Her story is...
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Adam Rex, illus. by Claire Keane. Chronicle, $17.99 (60p) ISBN 978-1-4521-6863-0
Part origin story, part therapy session, this high-voltage comedy by Rex (Nothing Rhymes with Orange) pits a supervillain against an inquisitive child. Doctor X-Ray, wearing a lab coat and rocket boots, crashes through the glass atrium of an upscale
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Adam Rex, illus. by Laurie Keller. Beach Lane, $17.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-5344-1453-2
Mid-conversation with the reader (“So, not to brag, but I’m mostly made of nitrogen”), Pluto picks up the phone. “Some scientists from Earth,” seen arguing on the title page (“NO WAY! I’m not calling him”), have disappointing news for the former...
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Adam Rex, illus. by Lian Cho. Chronicle, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-7972-0794-0
Via a quartet of unconditionally, relentlessly loving aunts, Rex (Gladys the Magic Chicken) and Cho (It Began with Lemonade) breathe new life into a staple of kid humor: the older, oblivious-to-personal-space relative. Exasperatedly observed second-p
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Adam Rex, illus. by Audrey Helen Weber. Holiday House/Porter, $18.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-8234-5717-5
Rex (Oh No, the Aunts Are Here) lets his storytelling powers rip in a tale whose gleeful surrealism seems to draw on Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories among other tales of the American West. Tumblebaby, painted by Weber (The Wind and the Clover) in...
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