“This brightly illustrated picture book, offers a lighthearted introduction to homophones, words that have different spellings and different meanings, though they sound the same. After moving to the zoo, Aunt Ant writes a letter (“Dear Deer . . .”) to tell a friend about her new neighbors, such as the moose who loves mousse and the giraffe whose “long neck lets him CHOOSE what he CHEWS.” The author/illustrator of Now & Ben: The Modern Inventions of Benjamin Franklin (2006), Barretta illustrates the text with a series of colorful, cartoonlike watercolor paintings, large enough in scale for classroom sharing and lightened with comic effects. Some of the scene, including the one illustrating the giraffe, involve rotating the book to see a vertical picture instead of the horizontal one. A curiosity for young children and a pleasant addition to school units that include homophones, this could be paired with Arlene Alda’s Did You Say Pears?”