Books like How to Catch a Mermaid
By Adam Wallace
Your kid finishes How to Catch a Mermaid already planning their own trap, a mirror here, a pile of pearls there, convinced this is the one that works. That itch to scheme up something impossible is the whole appeal. The books below give them another creature worth chasing under the waves.
Same funny twist ending as the mermaid hunt, but Winnie the Witch by Valerie Thomas solves a color problem instead of a catching problem.
The Girl Who Hated Books by Manjusha Pawagi pulls a whole cast of characters off the page instead of one clever sea creature, and it's just as gleeful.
Quieter and older-fashioned than Three Jovial Huntsmen by Susan Jeffers, but the same singsong momentum carries a silly forest romp along.
The rhymes keep coming, but There's No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System by Tish Rabe slips in real facts about planets between the jokes.
If the wordplay is what your kid quotes back at you, Science Verse by Jon Scieszka turns that same instinct loose on amoebas and black holes.
A curious kid wonders why snowmen look different every morning — crooked grins, shifted arms — and imagines the wild games they must be sneaking off to play all night long.
Less plot, more pure what-if daydreaming. If I was a Horse by Sophie Blackall is quieter than a mermaid hunt but just as happy to let imagination run loose.
The clever setup stays, but The Three Pigs by David Wiesner lets its characters walk right off the pages instead of just outsmarting a trap.
A team of kid inventors heads to the zoo armed with zany traps and rhyming plans, determined to outsmart and catch the rainbow-maned unicorn.
Skippyjon Jones Snow What by Judy Schachner keeps the goofy voices going but sends its hero into a snowy fairy tale instead of the ocean.
Six classic fairy tales get turned inside out in rhyme, as Cinderella, Snow-White, Little Red Riding Hood and others swap their storybook endings for wickedly unexpected ones.
All the letters of the alphabet race each other up a coconut tree, chanting chicka chicka boom boom, until so many pile on that the whole tree tumbles them down.
