My Friend Rabbit

Mouse lends his new toy airplane to his best friend Rabbit, and within moments Rabbit has managed to fly it straight into the top of a tree, out of reach of either of them. Rabbit's solution is to enlist every large animal in the woods, an elephant, a rhinoceros, a bear, a crocodile, and more, into a towering, precarious stack meant to reach the plane, and the plan works about as well as a wobbling pile of mismatched animals usually does: the whole stack collapses, scattering everyone across the page and leaving them thoroughly annoyed at Rabbit for the mess. Mouse, whose airplane started the whole disaster, never stops liking his friend anyway, and by the story's end Rabbit has hit on another scheme, promising more chaos still to come rather than a tidy resolution.

Eric Rohmann built the pictures from thick lined, hand colored relief prints, so every animal carries a heavy black outline and a rough, textured surface that gives the collapsing pile real weight and comedy. One key image asks the reader to physically turn the book sideways to see the full stack toppling over, a trick that lands harder read aloud, with a child doing the turning, than on the page alone. It is a nearly wordless story built on slapstick and forgiveness, short enough for the youngest listeners and funny enough that the joke survives dozens of rereadings. At thirty two pages it runs shorter than most picture books on this list, which suits toddlers and young preschoolers who are still building the attention span for a longer story, and its clear cause and effect structure, one animal after another climbing onto a wobbling pile, gives an adult reading aloud plenty of room to build suspense with their voice before the inevitable collapse.