Zelinsky are on a mission to raise awareness of genre to a level of madcap chicanery. Kelly Bingham and the illustrator Paul O. To set matters straight, the reader is enlisted to twist the irreverent book sideways and shake its characters out of oblivion, a moment of participatory theater that feels like its own bit of naughty fun. All who try to make the crossing - a concerned friend, emergency vehicles, even perplexed Bella - vanish through the book’s exposed scaffolding.

The two sides of the book are not continuous with each other, and Byrne has transformed the fold between them into a kind of portal, emptying to an imagined nether region. On the next spread, as Bella yanks the leash, the dog disappears entirely. “Bella was taking her dog for a stroll across the page when” (turn the page) “something very odd happened.” Half the dog vanishes in the space between the two pages - the crease book designers call “the gutter.” Odd things do indeed transpire when one reads books. In its opening spread we find elfin, round-faced, shabby-chic-dressed Bella prancing across the right-hand page, and leading a friendly cow-like dog, situated on the left-facing page, by a leash. The endpapers of “This Book Just Ate My Dog!” by the British writer and illustrator Richard Byrne, are covered with the repeated apology “I promise not to be a naughty book,” written out in a simulation of an errant child’s scrawl. These five specimens of reinvention deftly pop the bubbles of their own illusory worlds, drawing attention to the artifices of their norms and aiming to teach children to become not just book lovers but pint-size “consumers of text.” The best of these books, luckily, manage to find fresh magic in demystification, and to delight kids while spinning the heads of their grown-up companions. Now, sophisticated cheekiness appears to have gone mainstream. There has long been a strain of subversion in picture books - think of Maurice Sendak and Tomi Ungerer, among others - alongside the dominant anodyne snuggliness of the form. But on the evidence of a recent spate of highly self-conscious picture books, it would seem that the suspended-disbelief state of early childhood is adapting to the wink-wink, nudge-nudge sensibility of our moment. Have your kids gone meta? Do they call their neighborhood jungle gym a “play structure”? Do they mix and match their dress-up garb - a tiara here, firefighter’s boots there - with a sense of mischief that might, unnervingly, be termed “ironic”? Have they spotted the clown at the neighbor’s birthday party removing his wig and slinking out the side door? They’re probably not ready for the labyrinthine tricksterism of David Foster Wallace or Spike Jonze.

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