A Sick Day for Amos McGee

Amos McGee works at the city zoo and keeps the same careful routine with five animal friends every single day: a game of chess with the elephant, a footrace with the tortoise that Amos always lets end in a tie, a quiet sit beside the shy penguin who needs company more than conversation, a spare handkerchief handed to the rhinoceros, who always has a runny nose, and a bedtime story read aloud to the owl, who is afraid of the dark. When Amos catches a cold and stays home instead of catching the number five bus to work, his five friends notice his absence and decide, without any adult prompting, to board the same bus themselves and go find him. Each one comforts Amos in exactly the way he always comforts them: the elephant plays chess with him in bed, the tortoise wins their race for once, the penguin sits close by, the rhino lends its own handkerchief, and the owl reads him a story before all five settle in for the night and catch the bus home again the next morning.

Philip C. Stead's text is plain and quiet, built almost entirely from that repeated structure of routine and its gentle reversal, and it suits very young listeners who like predicting what comes next. It is a calm, unhurried book rather than an eventful one, closer in spirit to a lullaby than an adventure, and its steady kindness rather than any twist is what has kept it in heavy rotation at bedtime.