By Mike Lowery
A duck named Carl recruits your child into a secret order of explorers, and the first thing they have to do is draw themselves onto the page.
Carl is a duck. Carl is also a member of a very secret, very international group of explorers, and he has decided your child is joining him to go and find a stolen treasure out in space. Before anything else happens, the book asks your child to draw themselves into it. That's them now, on the page, next to the duck. From there Carl keeps asking. Draw the ship. Draw what's behind that door. Draw the monster, and be warned, whatever they draw is what they then have to deal with. The book is paper-over-board with thick cream paper, built to be scribbled on, and it never once asks your child to sit quietly and take something in.
The trick here is that the story physically cannot continue until your child picks up a pencil. There's no version of this where they slump through it and hand it back. Whatever they draw becomes what's true, so a child who was sure books had nothing to do with them ends up as the main character of one, in their own handwriting. It's the shortest and lightest thing on this shelf, maybe forty minutes of work, and at the end they have a finished book with their own drawings all through it. For a child who has never once finished a book, that object does a lot.