THE PENGUIN AND THE STRANGE ANIMAL

A recognizable pre-schooler's misconception isn't necessarily a likely story in itself, and Sloan doesn't make much of penguin Josh's belief that the zookeeper's wife's vacuum cleaner is a hungry animal. In order to appease its noisy hunger, Josh feeds the creature food, feathers, papers and part of a cookbook, until it finally hiccups and, with a green flash, stops eating. Later when he can't turn it on again Josh fears that the cleaner is dead, but, after the zookeeper has it repaired, Josh takes to helping his wife with her vacuuming--""very, very careful now"" not to overfeed his friend. Jill McDonald's cartoons are slick, flat, black-outlined slabs of solid color, about as mundane and limited as the pointless shade of a story.