CONFISCATED!

Bickering brothers resolve their differences and recover their confiscated toys.

Brooks and Mikey, anthropomorphic dinosaurs, fight over everything. And when they fight, their mother confiscates whatever it is that they’re refusing to share—a bike, “Grandpa’s tuba,” a “Mexican wrestling mask,” and so on. Soon, their toys are all stuffed into a bulging storage closet, and all the boys can do is talk with each other. Their reminiscing about an “epic paper-plane battle,” among other feats, leads them to recall winning “the last red balloon,” something their mother confiscated in frontmatter pages and that can be seen through those storage-closet doors. Working together, they stack odds and ends to retrieve the balloon, and, predictably, they end up jostling the storage closet enough that its doors burst open and all of their confiscated toys come spilling out in a great big mess. Despite their worries about being “busted” by their mom, the brothers end up basking in her praise for sharing the balloon—but they still have to clean up the mess they’ve made. Kaufman’s cartoon style with its bright palette against the white of the page adds vitality to the quarreling characters in this humorous sibling-rivalry story.

A good book on sharing and for sharing.