Akissi Cat invasion Cat invasion /

SHORT STORIES are for everyone, even the wee. Three new collections - very different from one another in looks and tone - offer distinct pleasures for young readers. One's soothing; one's sly; and one's downright uproarious. VERNON IS ON HIS WAY (ROARING BROOK, 64 PR, $19.99; AGES 4 TO 8), by Philip C. Stead, is the sweetest and gentlest of the three. The subtitle, "Small Stories," is fitting; the focus is on mood, on reflection, on the moments when the natural world seems kind and safe. Stead's use of charcoal, pastel and crayon adds to the quiet, tender feeling that suffuses the collection. You may remember Vernon, a toad, from Stead's "A Home for Bird." In it, Vernon tries hard to entertain a new blue avian friend, unaware that Bird is not sentient but rather a wooden cuckoo fallen from a clock. What makes the story touching as well as funny is that Vernon takes Bird's silence for homesickness and tries desperately to make him happy. Stead's new collection is similarly kindhearted. In the first of the three stories, "Waiting," Vernon, well, waits. Like Vladimir and Estragon, he "waits, and waits, and waits." Stead deploys a huge amount of white space and a long minimalist line of green horizon to show just how all-consuming waiting can be. Preschoolers will relate. When the wait finally ends, it's with an incongruous, giggle-eliciting surprise. The second story, "Fishing," centers on Vernon's pal Porcupine and his anxiety about not knowing how to fish. One whole page is filled with an oversize, hunched, anxious Porcupine, little paws seeming to flex and clench with existential dread. ("I am ruining everything," he thinks, with the hopeless, neurotic intensity some adults would prefer to deny that small children feel.) But fishing turns out not to mean what we think it means, and when a fish leaps from the pond, surrounded by pussy willows and framed by a huge sun, the entire spread seems to explode with exuberant, ebullient color and humor. And in the final story, "Gardening," Vernon tries to remember his favorite things about his old friend Bird. "But sometimes," he thinks, "my memories are not so easy to remember." Porcupine and Skunk try to cheer him up with gifts of detritus from around the woods and pond - an old shoe, a red and white fishing bob, some acorns. They want to make Vernon happy. The poetic allusions in the last story to visual and rhetorical references earlier in the collection (and to the earlier Vernon book, though you needn't have read that one to appreciate this one) feel careful and lovely. The joys of this book are writ small, but they feel big. By contrast, Sergio Ruzzier's fox & CHICK: THE PARTY AND OTHER STORIES (CHRONICLE, 56 PR, $14.99; AGES 5 TO 8) shows that friendship can be challenging as well as comforting. Ruzzier, the author of picture books including "This Is Not a Picture Book!," has created a pair who seem to have nothing in common. Chick is a wacky little narcissist ping-ponging around the page; Fox is the fond, amused straight man. Though the book is recommended for roughly the same ages as "Vernon Is on His Way," it's a much easier book for newly independent readers to enjoy solo, and I suspect they'll read it again and again. The minimal, deadpan text is entirely written in white-space-framed panels with word-balloon dialogue, and like Ruzzier's clean, deceptively simple visual style, it goes down easy. In the first story, Chick throws a wild pool party in Fox's bathroom (oh, look, there's a mole passed out in the corner) and it becomes clear that Fox and Chick have different interpretations of what "may I use your bathroom?" means. In the second story, Chick asks why Fox doesn't follow a typical vulpine diet and chicksplains to him what proper foxes eat. (He intones, "They're supposed to eat squirrels ... lizards ... and little birds.") Three almost identical panels show the two friends chatting against a blue and white sky, but in the fourth panel, as Chick realizes what he's just said (and gulps "uh-oh"), Chick is alone, oversize, in a frameless box of white space. In the next full-page spread, all the ambient details are back as Chick flees, screaming. It's a visually hilarious one-two punch, a perfect use of the comics medium. Two pages later, the friends share a delicious vegetarian soup. (Whew.) In the third story, persnickety Chick finds it difficult to be an artist's model. Fox, as ever, is imperturbable. It's a subtle lesson, couched in humor: We can be friends with people who aren't just like us. And we can devour stories about people whose lives are very different from ours. AKISSI: TALES OF MISCHIEF (FLYING EYE, 188 pr, $14.99; ages io and up), by Marguerite Abouet, illustrated by Mathieu Sapin, feels new, daring, exciting and singular. Translated from French, it's a collection of 21 sixpage comics about a little girl in Ivory Coast, and it is utterly unputdownable. Based on Abouet's childhood memories of growing up in the port town of Abidjan (which also formed the basis of her awardwinning "Aya of Yop City" books for older readers, which have been translated into 15 languages), the rapid-fire, action-packed tales are wild and antic. The colors are electrie - purples, oranges, turquoises and bright yellows. Akissi has dark brown skin, beaded hair and a round Charlie Brown head ("You, with your big empty head, you're gonna get it!" her brother Fofana says through gritted teeth after she tattles on him. "It's you whose head looks like a huge pot!" she yells back, fleeing from him down a bright orange street with curly action lines shooting out behind her.) Akissi kidnaps a baby, gets a pet marmoset and deliberately contracts lice in an attempt to get her mom to cut off all her hair and avoid the pain of getting twists or braids. She plays middle-of-the-night tricks (pee is involved), behaves appallingly in church, and sneaks into a movie. The sense of place is powerful. In a bravura extended sequence, Akissi and her cousins visit her Nan's distant village. They take a shared minibus (with "LET'S DRIVE FAST, WE'RE IN A HURRY" painted on the side), bouncing along dirt roads with a huge-eyed, bewildered sheep tied to the roof atop a giant pile of luggage. There's an accident, and suitcases and pots and sheep go flying (the frame depicting the upside-down, freaked-out animal saying "baaa" as it flies over a cliff made me laugh out loud), but Akissi saves the day. Scary things happen: rogue coconuts, burning hair, poisonous snakes. But there's also cuddling with bunnies. I'd give "Akissi" to kids 10 and up, though the official publisher's recommendation skews younger. The type is perhaps forbiddingly tight, the illustrations are small and detailed, and the humor and situations may shock American kids with delicate sensibilities. (Akissi gets worms, which shoot out of more than one orifice after treatment.) That said, my 13-year-old kept stealing the book from my desk; whenever I heard her howling with laughter, I knew what she was reading. That's another great thing about short stories: There's something for everyone. MARJORIE INGALL is a columnist for Tablet magazine and the author of "Mamaleh Knows Best."

K-Gr 2-Akissi lives with her two siblings and their parents in West Africa. The book consists of a series of brief anecdotes, the subtitle coming from the first one. It would be overstating the case to say that the stories depict Akissi's adventures; they're nice, possessing the quiet charm of dinner-table anecdotes, and have a similar unpracticed lack of structure or resolution. Quaintly redolent of an oral tradition, they lack spark as stories on the page, never seeming to build either a composite understanding of Akissi's character or of the environment and culture in which she plays. The artwork is lumpy and scratchy, eschewing most formal cartooning techniques, but this, along with the nature of the stories, helps give it a personal, authentic feel. Brief and ephemeral, this will distract young readers momentarily, but there's nothing memorable here.-Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Ivory Coastborn Abouet (Aya, 2007, for adults) dishes out bursts of simultaneous hilarity and horror in African vignettes aimed at a younger audience. All seven episodes feature young Akissi and her brother Fofana or her friends getting into trouble for less-than-exemplary (to say the least) behavior. In "Good Mums," for instance, she borrows a neighbor's baby and tenderly feeds it a stew concocted from discarded scraps found in the market. "Home Cinema" has her playing lookout while Fofana sells spots in front of the television set to neighborhood children. She loses a fish to an opportunistic stray in "Cat Invasion." And in "Football Match," she kicks a soccer ball over a wall belonging to a surly hunchback and draws the (to her) logical conclusion: "He had swallowed it!" Framed in cleanly drawn, easy-to-read sequential panels, the art sets dialogue balloons and cartoon figures dressed in a casual mix of Western and traditional garb in an unpaved but well-kept urban neighborhood. Following the spectacularly gross "Tapeworm," an equally (but for different reasons) delicious recipe for "Coconut Goat's Droppings" caps this memorable introduction to a character whose further misadventures, already available in France, can't make their way across the pond quickly enough. Strong stomachs are a prerequisite. Even the strongest will be left both queasy and sore from laughter. (Graphic short stories. 7-10)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.