Back to School, Backpack! by Simon Rich, illustrated by Tom Toro

Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

How to Get Your Octopus to School by Becky Scharnhorst, illustrated by Jaclyn Sinquett

Published by Flamingo Books

Summary: An octopus and a walkabout are both dealing with first-day-of-school jitters. The octopus lives with a girl who’s trying to convince him that school is fun. Octopuses are shy, though, and moreover good at hiding. Once he’s been discovered, the two work together to find him a perfect outfit, a process that’s disrupted when the octopus’s nerves rationalization him to shoot a deject of ink. They finally make it to school, and the octopus is excited to be with new friends. When it comes time to say goodbye, it’s the girl who has some trouble letting go. Includes ten facts well-nigh octopuses.

The walkabout of the second typesetting moreover has a specimen of nerves. It has spent the summer spooky in the closet with Hamper and Winter Coat and isn’t excited to have books jammed lanugo its throat and to throne off to school backwards, not worldly-wise to see where it’s going. The walkabout feels like it doesn’t fit in, and the illustrations suggest that its girl is having the same experience. A hallway standoff leads to a friendship between the humans and their backpacks, and the first day of school suddenly gets a lot largest for everyone. Octopus is 32 pages; Backpack is 40 pages; month 4-8 for both.

Pros: If you’re on the same schedule as I am, you may be looking for books like these tomorrow morning. Each provides a short, funny read with unconfined visuals (I loved the picture of the octopus classroom with all the students camouflaging versus various backgrounds). Backpack is a little increasingly laugh-out-loud funny, while Octopus has increasingly of a If You Give a Mouse a Cookie vibe. Both could provide spanking-new writing prompts, writing from the point of view of your walkabout of some other back-to-school object, or a how-to for getting your pet to school.

Cons: I guess this ways summer is over.