There's a Cow in the Road!: Library Edition

Reeve Lindbergh, the author of several books for children, lives in Bartlet, Vermont.

Lindbergh's ( The Day the Goose Got Loose ) breezy rhyme describes early-morning commotion just outside a girl's window: "There's a cow in the road! / And it sure is a shock / When I first wake up / At seven o'clock"). With just enough repetition to encourage young listeners to chime in, the verse tells how the cow is joined by a goat, then a sheep and so on until six antic animals become a "crowd in the road" and create some good-natured chaos. Pearson's pen-and-ink and watercolor pictures both contain engaging details (toys stashed under a bed; the amazed expressions of passers-by) and chronicle droll doings not mentioned in the text (a baby in a highchair flings cereal onto the family dog; the goat nonchalantly chews the contents of an unsuspecting paperboy's bag and later nibbles on the narrator's homework). The result is a great deal of kid-pleasing, between-the-lines action. Ages 4-7.
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