The Younger has always had a powerful secret skill: she can judge a book by its cover. I don't
know quite how she does it, but whenever we're hanging around the
library, even years ago when she could tell an A from a B, she would
move purposefully through the picture books until she found one that
somehow looked right to her. Then she would pull it out, put it on our
stack, and insist on it. And it wasn't just about the pictures. Some of them had terribly ugly covers, but somehow she chose ones in which the story itself was excellent. It took me a few times before I realized that
she was somehow, always, right. That's how we discovered a whole slew
of new books that I'd never encountered before, including her beloved
Rotten Ralph. But best
of all, she found The Paperboy.

This book is just what a book ought to be—a pass to a strange magical moment in someone else's world. It's intensely satisfying while being really, really quiet (even though yes, it's by the Captain Underpants author). We read it over and over. We love it.