Book excerpt: Every child who goes fishing dreams of catching the biggest, most beautiful fish in the world . . . The hero of this tender, glowingly illustrated story catches a fish so large and splendid that he takes it home and puts it in the bathtub so we can keep it forever. He picks flowers from the fields to make his fish feel at home. He reads it stories about animal friends. But the fish is sad—and because the boy likes his fish so much and wants it to be happy, he learns a real lesson about love. Max Velthuijs, one of Holland's foremost graphic artists, has created lovely, bright colored pictures that are at once realistic and full childlike fantasy. The Little Boy and the Big Fish is a memorable book, jolly, sad, and wise, with the honest emotion that children will recognize as their own. Praise for Max Velthuijs’s The Kind-Hearted Monster “With enduring themes of acceptance and kindness, these stories will charm a new generation.”—School Library Journal