PreS-Gr 2 —In three-and-a-half chapters, Dyckman and Teague use sentences and images that could be right out of a McGuffey Reader: "Bat, Cat, and Rat found a cozy home to share. 'Sharing is nice!' said Bat. 'It is,' said Cat. 'It is,' said Rat." For emerging readers, this is a fantastic start with lots of great reinforcement, and it just gets better. With similar sentence structures, the stories include one about their move into a house and picking rooms, another about practical jokes, and a third that takes on reading. Across the board, the book delivers on the "cozy" of the title. Cat and Rat are silly but Bat is the outlier, happy about everything, making the most of opportunities, and falling asleep under the stairs in the last "half" chapter. Teague scales back his style to simple shapes on clean white backgrounds, illustrating the occasional interior for snugness, and then offers wildly expressive facial reactions to help nudge context across. This is a charming early reader, a reminder of how mastery of the format invites children in not with vocabulary, but with story and meaning. VERDICT What a gift to reading, with one particular refrain acting as the recommendation: "Sharing is nice."—Ginnie Abbott

Dyckman (Don’t Blow Your Top!) and Teague (King Kong’s Cousin) empathically kick off a picture book series about saucer-eyed, sweetly goofy Bat, bibliophile Cat, and jokester Rat, who together move into the dormer-windowed house of the title. Sculptural acrylic paintings show the characters blossoming as both vivid personalities and visual presences in the shared home. Across the chapters, the trio discovers that ostensibly simple declarative expressions—“Sharing is nice!”; “Joking is fun!”; “Reading is THE BEST!”—reveal a range of individual experiences and expectations. In the first story, the characters’ dibs-calling has the potential to create a domestic conundrum. The second explores whether all forms of humor are amusing for all. And in the third, Cat’s frustration with Bat and Rat’s peering at her book reveals that neither pal can read, resulting in a successful collaborative effort. Subtly but effectively, the book’s veteran creators show that mutual understanding is worth working for, even when it requires ceding some of one’s own assumptions. Ages up to 8. Author’s agent: Scott Treimel, Scott Treimel NY. (Feb.)