Cleo and the Coyote

Elizabeth Levy loves to tell stories that combine serious issues with humor. She has proven it with her award-winning books for young readers, including My Life As A Fifth-Grade Comedian, Keep Ms. Sugarman In The Fourth Grade, and other best-selling books in the Sam and Robert series, including Frankenstein Moved In On The Fourth Floor and Dracula Is A Pain In The Neck. She lives in New York City.

PreSchool-Grade 2?Everything about this book is warm. It's an engaging story with illustrations rendered in rich, glowing colors that reveal character, action, and setting. Every painting is embraced by a vivid frame that playfully echoes the narrative with patterns and designs combining traditional American Indian motifs with a few modern flourishes. What could be described as a simple plot is, upon reflection, a rather complex weave of elements. An abandoned dog finds a home with a boy and his mother in New York City. Just as Cleo adjusts to the comforts and constraints of hearth, home, and family love, she finds herself caged and crowded into an airplane's baggage compartment enroute to Utah. A visit with the boy's sheep rancher uncle provides the pup with a shocking new landscape, strange desert smells and sights, and an improbable new relationship with a coyote. Here Levy departs boldly and successfully from her dog-meets-boy story and extends the breadth of this tale. Cleo and the coyote ("Tricky") are wary, curious, attracted, and-although they go separate ways-ultimately connected. The tone is unsentimental: Cleo is a wisecracking little city dog, with her sentences clipped to phrases to produce snappy rhythms (but her face is all sweetness). And as the plaintive answering howls of Cleo and Tricky tell us, this is, for all the tough talk, a tale of love. Wonderful for sharing up close or with a group.?Susan Powers, Rock Creek Forest Elementary School, Chevy Chase, MD
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.