DUMPY LA RUE

A barrel-shaped Baryshnikov soars over his assigned role in life in this breezy toe-tapper from a pair of picture-book veterans. His parents may assert that pigs don’t dance, his sister may sniff, “ ‘Fat chance,’ ” but Dumpy knows what he wants to do—and in no time his jetés and glissades have the other animals juking to their own inner rhythms. To Winthrop’s narrative, which is filled with rhymes but irregular enough of meter to have a jazzy, improvisational feel, Lewin, who just won a Caldecott Honor for Doreen Cronin’s Click, Clack, Moo! Cows That Type (not reviewed), matches similarly splotchy, brush-lined farmyard scenes, these featuring a stylishly posed piglet who is soon joined by sashaying chorus lines of rats, chickens, cattle, and other livestock. (“The goats did a two-step. / The fox did a three. / The mule danced the salsa with a neighboring tree.”) A male Olivia he’s not, but fans of Mary Jane Auch’s barnyard bourreés (Bantam of the Opera, 1997, etc.) will give Dumpy La Rue a standing “O.” (Picture book. 5-7)