THE RACE OF THE CENTURY

Once again, “slow and steady” leads to a “Bad Hare Day.” Grumbling Tom Tortoise slips on a sweatband and squares off against sleekly furred but human-shaped Flash Harry Hare as the citizens of Critterville and—thanks to “Don Key’s Wide World of Sports”—TV audiences around the world look on in wide-eyed excitement. Downard gives the old fable a frenetic cast, with digitally reworked photo montages that spill past page edges and feature livestock, billboards, newspaper headlines, articles of sportswear and more jammed into the foregrounds. The writing is less sophisticated than the art—“Snoozing Flash Harry Hare woke with a start, at the exact same moment Tom Tortoise was about to finish!”—and like Margery Cuyler’s Road Signs: A Harey Race With A Tortoise, illustrated by Steven Haskamp (2000), or Downard’s own version of the “Little Red Hen” (2004), this iteration will appeal most to readers already familiar with the basic story. (Picture book/folktale. 6-8)