Poor Gracie. All this little pooch wanted was a quiet house, with "the kitty sleeping on the windowsill, the big dog sleeping on the couch, the quiet fish going ploop-ploop." But then one day the painters came. In a "big, noisy truck," with "clangy ladders and big-person voices." Clearly, there was only one solution: "She barked and barked and told them to go outside. But do you know what? Gracie was put outside!" And so begins the Great Gracie Chase, as this otherwise obedient little pup goes from miffed to mischievous, leading everyone from the paperboy to the delivery woman to the painters themselves on a town-wide caper, in search of the one thing she wants most--a little peace and quiet. As a proven master of the cute but not cloying, Cynthia Rylant (author and illustrator of Dog Heaven and Cat Heaven) sets a fun pace for little Gracie Rose (also the name of her real-life dog). But the real winner in Chase is rascally illustrator Mark Teague, who infuses wit and bounce into subject matter that's decidedly more mundane than in some of his other work (How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?, The Lost and Found). (Ages 4 to 8) Paul Hughes
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