THE BEDTIME ADVENTURES OF SUPER FAUN!

A family cat becomes a superhero in several wacky adventures, which she escapes through luck, persistence, and daring, in this debut children’s book.

Faun, a cat belonging to the Lucases, is an ordinary enough feline during the day, but during bedtime stories, she becomes Super Faun. In a dozen illustrated exploits, Super Faun drives a car-pool van and encounters the police; fights crime and villains such as Green Samurai; visits a carnival and performs on the flying trapeze; and goes on a service mission and several vacations with the Lucases. Somehow Super Faun always meets up with trouble, or at least action. Driving the van, for example, she’s pulled over by cops, landing in prison and eventually escaping; driving through Alaska, she gets into a snowball fight, joining forces with moose against polar bears. But the resourceful cat, who relies more than once on one of her nine lives, always gets out of difficulties, often saving her family through pluck and panache. Each tale is accompanied by illustrations with hidden images for children to find, and each escapade concludes with a choice of three different, short endings. Tedesco (Augi the Monster Hunter—Phoenix, 2016, etc.) provides colorful and amusing, though somewhat flat and clumsy, pictures. The hidden images are often cleverly disguised, as when lipstick masquerades as a fence post. Lago and the Lucases write energetically and with humor: for example, car-pooling Faun gets detained for “impersonating a mother,” and the feline helps a lightning-struck airplane make a safe water landing by giving it “parachute cat floaties” on each wing. Children are also likely to savor the crazy situations and occasional grossness, such as when Super Faunie Meowy One (apparently an avatar of Super Faun) lets rip a “humongous, most-ginormous-sounding, and hideously dead-fish-scented” fart, which paralyzes Green Samurai “in complete nose-odor agony.” Parents who aren’t Mormon may need to explain some of the book’s references, such as the LDS Temple in Washington, D.C., and what a service mission is.

Enjoyable bedtime reading that offers several opportunities for kids to participate in stories starring a brave feline.