• Who's Reading What on Wednesdays?

Chloe by Peter McCarty can be counted among the crop of recent picture books about how simple pleasures provide more entertainment than technology, but it has an understated, tongue-in-cheek humor that is all its own.

A bunny named Chloe can’t wait for “family fun time,” but is completely thrown when her parents break out a brand new television and all but one of her twenty siblings are mesmerized by the dreaded box. This is not what Chloe considers true family fun time. But it turns out a television can’t compete with popping bubble wrap—or pretending to be a giant piece of pound cake attacking a city—and Chloe manages to lure her many siblings away from the television for a different kind of fun while mom and dad remain glued to the tube.

Though the facial expressions of McCarty’s bunnies remain virtually identical throughout the book, their posture gives clear insight into their feelings. Chloe and her sister Bridget hide behind the coach, arms crossed, while the television blares, and the characters float around the pages as though life as a picture book bunny is as unencumbered as we can only hope it is.