Gluey: A Snail Tale
Vivian Walsh and J. otto Seibold (Olive, the Other Reindeer,Penguin Dreams) create  another winning, whimsical world inGluey: A Snail Tale. The story begins  when a bunny named Celerina finds a beautiful, empty house and moves right in.  Little does she know, a snail named Gluey lives there, too, fixing all the  house's cracks as carpenter snails like to do. One day, Celerina breaks a vase!  Gluey tells her he could fix it, but his voice is so soft, she can't hear him.  That night, he slowly repairs her vase. As this sort of gluey alchemy continues  to happen, Celerina becomes more and more convinced her house is magic. She  decides to have a tea party to prove to her skeptical friends that dishes would  be repaired before their very eyes in her enchanted house! Of course, when the  party derails into a plate-breaking free-for-all, the house itself collapses  into pieces. Seibold's sophisticated, retro, stylized illustrations and color  palette are no less than fantastic, and Gluey is perhaps the cutest children's  book snail of all time. Children will be crushed by the injustice Celerina shows  Gluey, then overjoyed at the end when they become friends. (Ages 5 and older)--Karin Snelson