THE SCARECROW'S HAT

A brilliant watercolorist, Brown sets this familiarly patterned tale in sunny, poppy-strewn rural locales, and populates it with animals that are at once wonderfully lifelike and comically expressive. Chicken has her eye on Scarecrow's straw hat, which Scarecrow is willing to trade for a walking stick. Badger has a stick, and is willing to trade that for a ribbon. Crow has a ribbon . . . and so on, until Chicken reaches Donkey, whose yen for a feather flyswatter finally triggers the string of trades. Chicken ends up with the hat—perfect, as it turns out, for a cozy nest—" 'And I wouldn't swap it for anything!' " Full-bleed, double-paged spreads tell most of the story, with a set of vignettes in the middle to move the action back along the track. Fans of Brown's hysterical The Wolf Is Coming! (1998), written by Elizabeth MacDonald, will find this a bit more restrained, but with a similarly broad streak of silliness. Great for storytelling, with big beautiful pictures for a topper. (Picture book. 5-7)