THE AWFUL AARDVARKS SHOP FOR SCHOOL

The first week of September means the annual back-to-school shopping spree for school supplies, and even not-quite-civilized aardvarks need new backpacks, notebooks, and markers (both the fat kind and the skinny kind, as every parent of a first-grader knows). The author and illustrator (The Awful Aardvarks Go to School,1997) team up for this second accounting of amusing aardvark antics, with Lindbergh’s clever rhyming couplets and a continuing device of the shopping list repeating on the border of each two-page spread. The quartet of Awful Aardvarks romps through the Shop-All-Day Mall as items are crossed off their list, causing mischief in one shop after another and headaches for the animal shopkeepers. Pearson’s loose watercolors are a busy delight, with expressive faces on the horrified store clerks and fellow shoppers and lots of little details to discover in multiple readings. Just after exiting a candy store with sticky hands and faces, the aardvarks cause particular trouble for the bowtied bear shopkeepers in the Bears and Bubbles Bookstore. “All the shoppers stopped shopping and gave them weird looks. The Aardvarks were stuck—they were stuck to the books!” (Don't miss the display of award-winning “Called-a-Cat Books.”) No money changes hands for all the aardvark purchases, and no shopping bags (or momma aardvark) are seen to hold all the new supplies, but who needs a realistic view of the modern mall when you can have roly-poly aardvarks racing on Rollerblades or trying on feather boas? A rollicking romp of a picture book that will make an excellent first-day-of-school story for primary-grade kids. (Picture book. 4-7)