Children old enough to know the song The Wheels on the Bus will enjoy Hort's parody featuring a series of wild animals who, improbably, find their way onto a city bus. Two children and their parents board a bus driven by a tiger. As they ride along, they observe the mounting frenzy as the bus gradually fills with groups of seals, geese, rabbits, monkeys, vipers, sheep, and skunks, each making an appropriate sound or motion. Soon after the skunks on the bus go sssss, sssss, sssss, the people on the bus go HELP, HELP, HELP! and it's time for everyone to disembark for the party at the end of the line. Karas' artwork combines cut paper, gouache, acrylic, and pencil to create a series of pleasingly varied scenes of cheerful chaos. A good story hour choice, this picture book needs only one thing: a group of children to sing along. A witty new version of an old favorite.

"The seals on the bus go / errp, errp, errp, / All around the town." The animals have taken over a favorite preschool song in this wild bus ride. The mayhem rises as a different animal boards at each stop--geese, monkeys, rabbits, and a scowling though hardly fearsome tiger driver. The match-up of text and art is completely successful, with the silly but symmetrical variant of the song playing it straight to Karas's haywire illustrations. Don't miss the ride.

With a tiger at the wheel, the big purple bus rolls all over town, picking up a menagerie of passengers from sheep ("BAAAH, BAAAH, BAAAH") to vipers—get it? — ("HISS, HISS, HISS") to skunks ("SSSS, SSSS, SSSS") before disgorging its dismayed human riders ("HELP! HELP! HELP!") at an outdoor party. Though wild creatures waddle, tramp, or slither aboard by troops there's always room for more in Karas's ( Raising Sweetness , 1999, etc.) gleeful paint-and-paper collage scenes. The scene on the bus is bound to provoke a great reaction and reading (or honking) along is inevitable. It's a frolicsome spin on the familiar play rhyme, and a surefire alternative or follow-up to Maryann Kovalski's Wheels on the Bus (1987) or Paul Zelinsky's classic popup version (1990). Hop onboard. (Picture book. 5-7)

PreS-Gr 2-In this send-up of the traditional activity song, an unsuspecting family of four is joined by seven successive sets of animals (seals, geese, rabbits, monkeys, vipers, sheep, and skunks) on their bus ride to a local fair. So instead of swishing with the wipers or beeping with the horn, children "hiss" with the vipers and "honk" with the geese, and the bus driver, who happens to be a tiger, goes "ROAR, ROAR, ROAR." Karas's mixed-media cartoon collages wonderfully convey Hort's hyperbole. Kids will love adding these zoological lyrics to the ever-expanding onomatopoeia of "The Wheels on the Bus."-John Sigwald, Unger Memorial Library, Plainview, TX Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.