SID THE SQUID AND THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT JOB

Searching for the perfect job, Sid, a giant squid, leaves his ocean home for the big city. There, a new human friend helps him locate and try out a variety of roles, from traffic director to electrician. Nothing seems just right, until he saves a whale and finds his niche at an aquarium with an animal-rescue program. Derrick, a story artist at DreamWorks Animation, wrote and digitally created the art for this, his first picture book, which reads like a storyboard for an animated cartoon. The plot is neatly summarized by the back-cover portrait of the anthropomorphized squid holding the tools of his various trades. Details of the edges of the full-bleed pictures and occasional double-page spreads are lost in the gutter. As is traditional in cartoons, lines like. “Sid was a squid out of water” will be over the heads of youngsters, but they may be amused by the results of Sid’s efforts and satisfied by the resolution of this slight story; there's no way they will miss the explicit and unsurprising moral: "[T]here is a perfect job out there for everyone." (Picture book. 4-7)