A lupine black sheep if ever there was one, Rufus blows off all of his classwork at Big Bad Wolf Academy to lounge in the meadows, howl at the moon and generally fool around. However, he earns a special award at graduation by driving off a crew of hunters, then gets all of his classmates to “put away their lessons” in sheep language, dressing as grannies and the like to be wild wolves again—except at Halloween, when a little skill at disguises comes in handy for trick-or-treating. Sneed illustrates this unabashedly subversive episode with scenes of sinuous, feral-looking wolves comically attired in human dress or, in Rufus’s case, jumping rope with small woodland buddies and sticking pencils up his nose. His unshakeable self-confidence echoes that of the budding florist in Marie-Odile Judes’s Max, the Stubborn Little Wolf (2001), and makes for an amusing contrast to the wimpy wallflower in Delphine Perret’s The Big Bad Wolf and Me (2006). (Picture book. 6-8)
