BEANY

This might be a demonstration, if another is needed, that you can't make a satisfactory picture book out of nothing but pictorially-diverting oddments--in this case, the casual doings of the little boy narrator and his cat, Beany. At one opening the two play cat and then hide and seek (with elaborations thereon), at the next Beany is briefly lost and quickly found; but in the absence of any dramatic thrust from first to last, or any momentum from one opening to the next, there's precious little reason to keep turning the pages--except, idly, to keep an eye on Karen Gundersheimer's mildly amusing, more-than-usually-Sendak-like figures. And even they lose some of their natural charm ""when I'm sad [and] Beany winks at me and whispers in my ear.