ZOOM! ZOOM! ZOOM! I'M OFF TO THE MOON!

With infectious excitement, a young child bounds through his door, into a rocket and off to the moon. The short, rhymed text, replete with exclamation points, pounds away like a rapid heartbeat--""Boosters blast!/Moving fast./Engines roaring./Rocket soaring""--while the young traveler, resembling the Michelin Man in his huge, orange spacesuit, tumbles about in free fall, watches the earth rise from the lunar surface, then waves at the crowds celebrating his return before bounding back into his parents' arms, and to bed. Using hot, shimmeringly intense hues that shift from spread to spread, Yaccarino (If I Had a Robot, 1996, etc.) creates big, simple paintings so energetic they practically need to be held down; this is his most emphatic crowd pleaser since Eve Merriam's Bam Bam Bam (1995)