Tuesday

On a Tuesday evening around eight o'clock, frogs across a wetland begin rising into the air on their lily pads and drift over a sleeping town. They peer in on a man eating a late snack, glide silently through a backyard, and a small group floats straight into an elderly woman's living room, where they commandeer her television remote while she dozes in her chair, unaware. Near dawn a dog gives futile chase to a low flying frog before the entire fleet drops back into the pond as the sun rises, leaving nothing behind but a scatter of abandoned lily pads that baffled townspeople find scattered across streets and yards the next morning. Told in barely six words total, mostly timestamps, the book is almost entirely wordless, and its final page jumps forward to "next Tuesday," where pigs are shown lifting off a farmyard, implying the whole strange event is about to happen again to someone else entirely.

David Wiesner paints in richly detailed, realistic full color spreads, playing an ordinary, precisely rendered town against the sheer absurdity of levitating frogs, and he varies perspective constantly, close on a single frog's face one page, a wide aerial view of the whole town the next.

Since there is almost no text, this is a book a child narrates back to an adult as much as one read to them; it works from around age three up precisely because no reading level is required, and repeated readings reward children who start noticing recurring visual jokes, like a cat watching the whole spectacle in open disbelief.