Newcomer Beck’s book has two winning ingredients: an engaging, spunky main character and the kind of color last seen 50 years ago on fruit-crate labels: buffed but with bite, the better to get your attention. The character is Pepito, a fledgling who doesn’t like heights. So when his siblings leave the nest and fly to a neighboring tree, Pepito climbs down and starts walking. A fox, a frog, a fish, and a gopher give him some pointers on how to surmount obstacles in his path. When he finally makes it to the new perching place, his brothers and sisters are wowed by his adventure: “But Pepito,” they said. “If you are brave enough to do all those things” . . . like run, hop, swim, burrow, and climb . . . “then you must be brave enough to fly!” And he is. Forget all that stuff about performance anxiety and willful underachievement; Pepito simply goes his own way and the journey introduces him to a world he otherwise would never have laid his peepers on. Sly, assuring, and paint-box bright, this is a snappy salute to independence and adventure. (Picture book. 3-6)
