Today’s review is a double feature:  Tom Lichtenheld’s Cloudette and David Conway’s Shine Moon Shine.

Tom Lichtenheld.  Cloudette.  New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011.

Cloudette liked being the smallest cloud in the sky, until she saw all the great things her bigger friends could do.  One day a storm blew her very far away, and in her new neighborhood Cloudette found something important she could do.

Lichtenheld has a fun, goofy sense of humor, and it shows in his drawings — even more in the way his drawings talk to each other.

Here and there he throws in a weather-related term that parents and teachers can explain further, and even makes little jokes on the copyright page and back cover.

. . . . .

David Conway.  Shine Moon Shine.  Illus. Dubravka Kolanovic.  Wilton, CT: Tiger Tales – ME Media, 2008.  Originally published in Great Britain: Hodder Children’s Books, 2007.

One night the moon fell from the sky and wouldn’t go back.  It was too dark and lonely up there.  So a boy named Owen tried everything he could think of to make the moon feel better.

The story is whimsical, and Kolanovic’s illustrations are gorgeous soft-textured blends of buttery yellow, magenta, blue-green, and midnight blue.  You can’t see it in the above image, but the moon is even swirled with glitter on the front cover.

Even the text sometimes curves and swirls around the images.