The Cozy Home: Three-and-a-Half Stories

PreS-Gr 2–In three-and-a-half chapters, Dyckman and Teague use sentences and images that could be right out of a McGuffey Reader: “Bat, Cat, and Rat found a cozy home to share. ‘Sharing is nice!’ said Bat. ‘It is,’ said Cat. ‘It is,’ said Rat.” For emerging readers, this is a fantastic start with lots of great reinforcement, and it just gets better. With similar sentence structures, the stories include one about their move into a house and picking rooms, another about practical jokes, and a third that takes on reading. Across the board, the book delivers on the “cozy” of the title. Cat and Rat are silly but Bat is the outlier, happy about everything, making the most of opportunities, and falling asleep under the stairs in the last “half” chapter. Teague scales back his style to simple shapes on clean white backgrounds, illustrating the occasional interior for snugness, and then offers wildly expressive facial reactions to help nudge context across. This is a charming early reader, a reminder of how mastery of the format invites children in not with vocabulary, but with story and meaning.