THE BEAR UPSTAIRS

Like the members of your family, you don’t get to choose the upstairs neighbor in your apartment house. Mozelle’s downstairs bear gets an especially cacophonous upstairs bear for a neighbor. She (downstairs) is the retiring type, a writer who needs peace and quiet; he (upstairs) is a symphony—a deeply atonal symphony—of crashes, booms and bad singing in the shower. He is also just moving in, so his galumphing is especially full of galumph. But despite the looks of exasperation she shoots at the ceiling when he commits another bit of racket, Cushman draws the upstairs bear as a jolly old soul, suffused with a warmth equal to his aural mayhem. Doing the right thing—that is, not poking the ceiling with a broom handle—she heads up to meet him. Common decency finds common ground, and when the two start to tango, there’s no one downstairs to hear it. (Picture book. 3-7)