MY CRAZY SISTER

From a picture book artist who makes her point with understatement, the tomato red cover (repeated in frames around the black line drawings) is a surprise—and in fact this is a perkier Goffstein, about the narrator's sister (as pictured, she might as easily be a brother) who moves in, complete with unexplained baby and eccentric, if not crazy, habits. On arrival she plunks her baby on a shelf and forgets him for hours; she buys him a real railroad car instead of a toy train for his birthday; and later she gets an urge to fly and brings home an airplane. But then the narrator, despite her more conservative appearance, invited this last exploit with her peculiar gift: "To show my sister I was glad that she and her baby lived here, I bought her a picture of Amelia Earhart"—and though the sister "turned my whole house upside-down," the hostess repeatedly expresses her "deep joy" in the arrangement. Her happiness in fact is a bit too explicit to convey the maximum Goffstein poignance, but her openness is winning—and so are the characteristically spare drawings of this odd little family that is happy in its very own way.