Books like The Eleventh Hour
By Graeme Base
For the kid who wants to solve the mystery before anyone can tell them the answer, this book turns bedtime into a stakeout. Puzzling, lavish, and a little sly, with a birthday-party sparkle underneath the whodunit.
A cow, a donkey, a sheep, a pig, and a tiny mouse — good friends all — climb into a boat for a row in the bay, and the boat tips more precariously with each one who climbs aboard.
An alphabet journey where each letter unfolds into a densely packed illustration, from Armored Armadillos Avoiding an Angry Alligator to Horrible Hairy Hogs Hurrying Homewards, hiding dozens of matching objects to hunt for.
A young spider records his everyday life in diary entries — spinning sticky webs, scaling walls, taking wind-catching lessons, and surviving the occasional run-in with a vacuum cleaner.
A group of Maasai children sets out across the grasslands of Tanzania, counting animals from one to ten — a leopard, ostriches, giraffes — as they journey through the wild.
The Cat in the Hat whisks Sally and Dick on a rhyming tour of outer space, unpacking facts about the sun, moon, planets, and astronauts along the way.
Two boys and their dog set off on a mission to find something spectacular, digging straight down through the earth — and along the way narrowly miss treasure after treasure without ever knowing it.
A student gets stuck with a science curse after his teacher claims poetry is everywhere in science, and suddenly every rhyme in his head turns into a poem about amoebas, black holes, or the food chain.
A shape sets off to play a sneaky trick on his friend Square, but the prank sets off a chain of trouble that tests who's really outsmarting whom.
Three pigs build their familiar houses of straw, sticks, and bricks, but when the wolf huffs one pig right out of the story's pages, all three escape into a wild landscape of other tales entirely.
Two kids stuck inside on a rainy day get an uninvited visitor — a tall cat in a striped hat who promises fun and games while their mother is away.
A boy named Ned races a thousand miles to a surprise party, and every stroke of good luck — a borrowed airplane, a handy parachute — flips into disaster and back again.
A cast of insects — damselflies, beetles, and a pill bug named Icky — watches a tiny shoot grow into a plant, builds a tree fort in its branches, and faces something horrible that swoops down from above.
