Half of an Elephant tells the highly entertaining story of the day the world split in half, and all the animals were split into their front and back halves in the process. The two halves of an elephant each wander around searching for each other, mismatching with all sorts of other half-animals in pairings that cause an impairment to the new team's performance that forces them to move on. Eventually, both try to look on the bright side of only being half an elephant, before the world inexplicably reunites and they are popped back together.

As you can probably tell from the above image, what really makes this book exceptional is the whimsical, collage-based illustration style, with compositions pieced together by award-winning Argentinian illustrator Gusti from digital images of evocative bits of workbench and household detritus. The illustrations will make adults smile and fill older children with curiosity while younger readers are simply captivated by the story. We have seen this general style before, but this book's cleverly-designed creatures operate in a world that is busy yet beautifully uncluttered, and where color is frequently outstaged by texture; the font, too, is in harmony, a microscopically gritty take on an old serifed font with many of its lowercase "o's" throughout replaced by rusty washers.

This 11x8" hardcover is listed at $16, but is currently on sale for about $12 on Amazon.com. Highly recommended. - Jeremiah