Author-illustrator William Joyce has a dream: to be remembered for "a significant contribution to the cause of global silliness," as he told Sally Lodge in a Publishers Weekly interview. In books such as Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures with the Family Lazardo, A Day with Wilbur Robinson, Bently and Egg, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, Buddy, and Rolie Polie Olie Joyce presents characters and settings that are colorful, magical and slightly wacky. Joyce's cast of players includes such unique characters as a baseball-playing dinosaur, a frog who can sing and paint, a little boy who wakes up one morning to find himself becoming very, very small, an aging socialite who keeps a menagerie which includes three hundred St. Bernards and two gorillas on her New York estate, and a billiard-ball shaped robot who loves doing the rumba in his underwear.

Drawing on a wide range...