By Kevin Henkes
Lilly the mouse can't stand her new baby brother Julius, and Kevin Henkes lets her say so, hilariously, right up until an outsider insults him and she leaps to his defense.
Lilly was going to be the best big sister in the world, until Julius actually arrived. Now she can't stand him. She pinches his tail, tells him his eyes are beady and his fur is not soft, corrects her parents when they call him the baby of the world, and wishes him gone at every turn. Her mother and father stay endlessly patient. Then Cousin Garland comes over and says the exact mean things about Julius that Lilly's been saying all along, and Lilly turns on a dime and defends her brother like a small furious lion. Kevin Henkes plays every bit of it for comedy and never once tells Lilly her feelings are wrong.
Most new-sibling books hurry toward loving the baby by the last page. This one doesn't. Lilly gets to be furious and mean and funny about Julius, and nobody in the story tells her to stop feeling it. The fondness only turns up when she chooses it herself, defending him from her cousin. A child who's angry about a new baby at home may find it a relief to see all that anger on the page and treated as normal instead of a problem to fix.