Mousestache Moosestache by Ezra Jack Keats Award-winner Rowboat Watkins (Rude Cakes; Go-Go Guys) is a delightfully rhythmic, rib-tickling picture book about a mouse and a moose who together encounter an abundance of zany facial hair.
Readers meet Mousestache, a tiny gray mustachioed mouse, and Moosestache, a gargantuan brown moose with a thick black 'stache, as they bow down to each other in salutation ("How do you DO-stache?"). What follows is a cyclical series of spreads with comic-style vignettes, each repeating the opening text's portmanteau pattern. "Cowstache" is reading under a tree; "Coostache" is the bird reading beside the cow. The absurdity increases as mustaches adorn unexpected objects: "Shoestache" is the mouse's shoe-shaped abode with a mustache roof; "Grandfather clockstaches" have hair in place of hands; "Mountainous rockstaches" are crowned with clouds in a recognizable shape. Mousestache and Moosestache arrive in an equatorial forest where "tropical fruitstaches" (bananas and pineapples) "dancing in bootstaches... strum... lutestaches" and "toot flutestaches." Eventually the mouse and moose give readers a meta-farewell from outer space because they "ran out of roomstaches."
Watkins's eccentric yet charming illustrations, sprightly rendered with pencils, pens, and "whatever else happened to be right under the artist's nose," complement both the book's casual tone and quirky premise. The text's wild plays on the word "mustache" are likely to encourage humorous, tongue-tied read-alouds, while its simple rhyme and sentence structure should be accessible to emerging readers. Fans of Dr. Seuss, Philip Bunting's Wombat, and Scott Rothman's Parfait, Not Parfait! simply must(stache) pick up this book. --Cristina Iannarino, children's book buyer, Books on the Square, Providence, RI.