Amazing Cows!: Udder Absurdity for Children — Sandra Boynton

From Sandra Boynton -- as it could only come from Boynton -- an inventive exuberant jumble of a book for the young reader. Amazing Cows is a picture book, a storybook, a book of fun and games -- it's all those things in one. Plus it even includes a startling recording of Maurice Ravel's “Bolero Completely Unraveled for Orchestra and Kazoos” performed by Sandra Boynton & The Highly Irritating Orchestra, for download. (Running time is 17:14, but seems MUCH longer.)

A work of pure obsession, Amazing Cows celebrates cows and offbeat cowness with a miscellany of cow stories, cow poems, cow jokes, and other bovine ephemera. Along the way, expect lively guest appearances by ducks, pigs, and excessive numbers of chickens. There's a song: "It Had to Be Moo." A game: "Find the Hidden Cows." Famous Barnyard Composers (surely you've heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Moozart and Johann Sebastian Bockbockbock). Knock-knock jokes, a cow myth, and an Amazing Cow comic-book adventure: "Trouble on Zebblor 7." Cow fashion. Cow Limericks. How to Speak Cow. Plus so much mooer.

Amazing Cows is full-color, 96 pages long, and packed with the kind of silly fun that young readers adore, especially when they can read it to themselves -- and then read it to their parents, and then to their little brothers, and then to the family dog. Or the family cow.