Though I’ve been ill for about a month, I’ve still managed to read a couple of books to my daughter (or have her read them to me, when possible) each night, and our latest favorite is Sally and the Some-Thing. It’s a great spunky little girl book without the frills and princesses so many other little girl books force on us; instead, it’s just about the joy of being a child.

The cover looks ominous: a little girl in pigtails and overalls, shoeless and wide-eyed (and looking rather like my daughter, actually), peers into a dark, swirling swamp only to have two giant, evil-looking eyes gaze back at her. The Some-Thing, of course, turns out to be not-so-evil; this is a children’s book, after all!

The illustrations in the book are, of course, wonderful—both chunky and childlike while being skillfully rendered to make kids both wonder how scary it’s going to be—and later, to be reassured that there is nothing to be scared of after all. One two-page layout even looks a bit like a maze that my daughter likes to follow with her fingers.

George O’Conner’s wonderful book depicts Sally saying she is bored (of course, most little girls like Sally do not get bored; they are constantly full of ideas of things to do!) and that she’s off to the pond to catch something. Once there, she is just about as bored as ever—until something slithers out of the pond and onto the dock where Sally is sitting. At first, it looks a bit like an alligator (my daughter still swears it’s a frog), but it ends up being a “some-thing,” with slimy, bumpy skin, crooked teeth, a big fin on its green back, and a long blue tongue. It doesn’t speak English, but Sally seems to know what it means when it says “Bleagh!” and “Bloor!”

Like other girls of her age, Sally doesn’t shriek or run away from the some-thing, but instead yells, “Cool!” and takes the some-thing off on an adventure. While she finds that the thing isn’t very good at the things that she likes to do, she doesn’t really like the things that he likes to do, either. But eventually they find some things to do that they both enjoy, such as making (or eating, in the case of the some-thing) mud pies and burping. At the end of the day, Sally returns the some-thing back to his father, who was waiting for him in the swamp, and when she gets home, she tells her mom that her new friend is, of course, “really something.”