By Kiyohiko Azuma
A five-year-old girl meets doorbells, cicadas, and a park swing for the first time and treats each one like the best news on earth.
Yotsuba and her dad move into a new house, and that's about the whole story. She rings a doorbell. She meets the neighbors. She discovers air conditioning, a swing set, and the cicadas buzzing in the trees, and she comes apart over every one of them. At one point she decides she'll save the planet single-handedly by watering the road with a hose. Nothing is ever at stake, and it's still one of the funniest books your child is likely to read this year.
Most of the jokes live in the drawings, so a child who stalls on long paragraphs still catches every punchline. Each chapter is its own little self-contained disaster, so there's no plot to hold in your head between sittings. That's a real gift for the child who reads five pages and wanders off to do something else. It's also about the gentlest place I know to get used to reading right-to-left, since if you take a panel out of order the worst thing that happens is a joke lands a beat late.