Delacorte/Knopf Press

Children's Bookwatch, Oct, 2004

Delacorte/Knopf Press

1745 Broadway, New York NY 10019

www.randomhouse.com/kids

Peter Bailey provides the warm black and white embellishments to Allan Ahlberg's The Improbable Cat (0385731868 $9.95), a departure from his strictly picture-book format and venture into the world of older readers. Kids ages 8-11 will find this a fun story of David's new stray kitten, which turns out to be a unique cat. A first-person story keeps readers turning pages and guessing. Barbara Park's Junie B. First Grader: Boo? And I Mean It! (0375828060, $11.95) receives Denise Brunkus' fun drawings and another Junie B. series to appeal to kids ages 6-9. Here Junie looks forward to dressing up as something scary for Halloween--she chooses a clown, but her mother's sewing produces something a little less than fright. A holiday dilemma evolves. Wendelin Van Draanen's Shredderman 2; Attack Of The Tagger (0375823522, $12.95) returns the secret cyber-superhero to a new study, with Brian Biggs adding the black and white cartoon embellishments to a story of a kid who wants to fight crime and unfairness. Attack Of The Tagger is the second in a projected quartet, this showing how nerdy Nolan triumphs again in his latest mission--to catch a tagger in the act and post his crime on the web.