STARRING LORENZO, AND EINSTEIN TOO

Lorenzo Fortunato is the odd-egghead-out in a family of performers. While the others juggle, play banjos and crack wise, Lorenzo bumbles about, his head full of equations and space travel. His twin sisters taunt his ineptness—not mercilessly, but enough to give the story a realistic bite, which is softened by Nichols’s brisk, retro-flavored watercolors. More to Lorenzo’s liking, he fires up his spaceship and flies with Albert Einstein (who’s as likely as Howdy Doody to be recognizable to the publisher’s target audience of three- to five-year-olds) to distant galaxies, where the stars sing and the hippopotami are tiny and blue. Less to his liking, he misses his family. Albert understands (“Everybody needs a family”), and the two crash land their craft in the midst of a family performance—a neat piece of showmanship—and loving embraces ensue. Karlins’s finale may be clangingly unsubtle—there never seemed to be much of an issue that Lorenzo’s parents adored their little incompetent—but it also has a hug of inclusiveness that Walt Whitman would have admired. Every family needs an eccentric. (Picture book. 5-8)