Book of the Week: Cowboy and Octopus

Since we seem to be reading a lot of books lately, we thought we'd start reviewing a new favorite children's book every week. The books aren't necessarily new, but are those that are new to us! If you have a book that you'd like to have us review for the site, please contact us and let us know about it.

Our favorite children's book this week is the delightfully twisted Cowboy and Octopus, by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (40 pages, Viking Juvenile, 2007). Scieszka and Smith are the creative team behind the equally funny and offbeat The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, which my husband brought home one day and has remained a favorite in our house ever since.

Cowboy and Octopus seems fairly innocuous at first. A paper cut-out of a cowboy and an octopus, seemingly sourced from a mid-century clip art piece and a comic book, meet and become friends. Hallmark-style friendship sentiments give way to laugh-out-loud hilarity, such as when the cowboy cooks his new friend a dinner of his favorite foods—beans with bacon, bacon with beans, and just plain beans with a little bit of bacon (none of which octopus likes), when octopus futilely attempts to tell cowboy a knock-knock joke, or when cowboy feels the need to tell octopus the truth about his new hat.

It definitely helps to have a dry sense of humor to appreciate the full hilarity of Cowboy and Octopus. My husband and the kids apparently do—they read this book before bed last night, and before long all three dissolved into fits of giggling and laughter. I wondered what could possibly be so funny, and then read the book myself and found out!

You can buy Cowboy and Octopus at Amazon.com or your local bookstore, or look for it at your local library, which is where we found it. Actually, my four-year-old just grabbed Cowboy and Octopus off the library shelf at random, and we're glad she did.