I’M A TIGER TOO!

Energy and imagination reign from the Irish author-illustrator of Lizzie and Skunk. A boy asks the cat on the brick wall next to his house if he’s a tiger, and for a while, they are tigers together. The landscape and the protagonists transmogrify as the backyard becomes a lush jungle and the boy and the cat become striped. But then, “Oh, don’t go! / I don’t want to be a tiger all alone.” Next, the boy asks his dog if he’s a wolf, and boy and dog howl at the moon. The dog slinks away, too, and next a laundry basket and a fishpond turn the boy and a fish into sailors on the sea. But the fish goes and the boy is left alone by the brick wall once again. Meanwhile, on the other side of that wall, a family is moving in to an old house. There’s a boy: “I’m a boy like you,” he says, but our hero points out that he’s a “Tiger-Wolf-Sailor on the Sea” and asks if he’ll be a tiger, too. The new boy responds that “we’ll be tigers two.” The soft, clean watercolors limn each transformation gently: the boy is always wearing his T-shirt even when he’s slightly furry and has wolf ears, or is striped and clawed. The landscape shimmers from backyard to moonlit forest to ocean and back again in a perfect sense of pretend. (Picture book. 4-8)