One night, Kirsten’s mother wakes up in labour, yelling, “I’m having a baby, I’m having a baby.” Kirsten’s parents get lost on the way to the hospital, and her mother gives birth at the zoo. When they return a few hours later, Kirsten notices that her parents brought home a baby alligator. When two more trips to the zoo produce more animal babies and no baby brother, Kirsten takes things into her own hands. She goes to the zoo, finds the baby and restores him to her family. The animal mothers then storm the house looking for their babies.

This is classic Munsch. The parents are improbably stupid, the smart kid saves the day. The formulaic plot is peppered with onomatopoeic sounds that beg to be read aloud. Munsch’s work is now the object of something like a children’s literature cold war. On one side are many children’s book retailers and librarians who dislike Munsch intensely because he is so predictable. Ironically, this is the very quality that endears him to the other camp, parents of small kids and day care workers, who value the predictability they know small children respond to. The Munsch battle lines are firmly drawn. Those who love Munsch will welcome Alligator Baby, and those who don’t, won’t.

Life with small kids can be like a Munsch book—frantic, full of yucky stuff and loud sounds and adults who don’t feel half as intelligent as they used to. A diet of nothing but Munsch might be about as nourishing to the developing literary soul as a diet of Kool-Aid. But Munsch is now as important to a whole generation of children as any television character. That is a remarkable accomplishment. And, if the search for Munsch books takes unwitting parents into the encampments of the other side (aka libraries and children’s bookstores), children are the winners in this war.