By Fred Gwynne
A little girl draws what she hears when the grown-ups talk, so there is a king made of weather and a mommy with a small burrowing animal on her face.
There's no plot here and it doesn't need one. A small girl repeats the things her parents say, and on the opposite page you see the picture in her head. Daddy says there was a king who rained for forty years, and there he is, a crowned man pouring water on a countryside. Mommy says she has a mole on her cheek, and there's a little velvet mole sitting on her face. There are forks in the road, actual forks. Daddy says he has a frog in his throat. Every spread is one phrase and one gloriously literal drawing, and the whole thing runs on the gap between what she heard and what they meant.
This one is doing something very specific: it's homophones, almost entirely. Rained and reigned. Bee and B. Bare feet and bear feet. Your child hears one sound and the page shows the wrong meaning of it, which is the exact moment a child realizes that a sound and a word are not the same thing. That's a useful click to have happen, and Gwynne makes it happen by drawing a bear's feet on a man and letting your child do the rest. It's episodic, so a page or two at bedtime is a complete serving. Here's the thing to know though: because the whole book lives in how English sounds out loud, it is the hardest possible book for a child still learning the language. A child who doesn't yet hear rained and reigned as the same noise gets a picture of a wet king and no joke. Read it aloud, say both words, and it works. Read silently by an English learner, it mostly doesn't.