Plainly unable to stay out of mischief for long, Stanley and his canine buddies embark on a third escapade after Stanley's Party (2003) and Stanley's Wild Ride (2006)—this one with cosmic overtones. Slouching away from his picnicking human family, Stanley joins Nutsy, Alice and Gassy Jack in sniffing out an unattended ham sandwich. They find it in a small rowboat that proceeds to carry them down the river and out onto the scary sea. Could they be on their way to the end of Outside? What will they find there? A fence, undoubtedly, because "sooner or later you always come to a fence." Once again, Bailey endows her characters with believably doggy thought processes, and the pop-eyed, floppy-eared figures in Slavin's textured paint-on-gesso scenes positively exude enthusiasm, if not intelligence. Soon a "fence" looms up, in the form of a freighter's towering hull; the dogs are rescued, fed steak and sausage until they can barely move and then rowed back to land. The tale of how they found pooch paradise quickly becomes a legend throughout dogdom: "No dog has ever found that fence," Bailey concludes, "but they think about it all the time." The spiritual metaphor may need some explaining to children, but Stanley's waggish appeal will win over readers young or grown. (Picture book. 6-8)

PreS-Gr 2 The pup who was featured in Stanley's Party (2003) and Stanley's Wild Ride (2006, both Kids Can) is back. Here, readers follow Alice, Nutsy, Gassy Jack, and Stanleya gang of ever-hungry dogs. Wandering from a picnic hosted by their stingy owners, the quartet end up aboard a red rowboat that rushes them to "the end of Outside." They finally find the expected "fence" (the side of a huge ship) and are treated to steak and sausages by the rescuing sailors. Bailey's humor, sometimes subtle and other times overt, comes through on every page, never failing to ignore the gags available with doggy drool and canine impulsivity. Slavin's splendid acrylic paintings on gessoed paper teem with detail and texture that give a 3-D effect, as in the foggy scene with the lower torso of a rescuer dropping down from the enormous ship toward the rowboat rocking in waves that threaten wee Nutsy's life. Three "arfs" (that's cheers in dog talk) for this sensory-rich adventure. Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA