Forty The Fortune Teller by Drew Daywalt & Kevin Cornell

Oh, man, now I want to make a fortune teller (or a cootie catcher as some places rather bizarrely term them.)

Forty isn’t your usual paper fortune teller. Abandoned on the playground, she decides to get up and look around and see what’s up. That’s how she meets Chip, another recess cast-off who was dropped when the bell rang almost immediately after a kid took a bite out of his head. His plan now is to take the bus up to Canada where no kids will be able to finish off his delicious potato chip self.

But all talk of planning is interrupted by their discovery of a stray bolt that has somehow escaped the slide. While Forty and Chip certainly don’t want to get consumed by the kids, they don’t want those kids to come to harm either, so decide that they’d better put the bolt back in its place before doing anything else (and before the next recess bell sounds.) Their journey, however, is not without its obstacles, as Chip and Forty encounter all manner of hostiles as they trek across the playground. Will their grit and ingenuity help them complete their task and get away clean?

This is a terrific children’s tale of thinking fast on your feet and refusing to give up, no matter how the odds seem stacked against you. It’s filled with magic and wit and humor, and has important lessons about friendship and resilience. The writing is perfect for advancing readers who are old enough to start making paper fortune tellers themselves. I kinda wish that there’d been instructions for same in this book but those are pretty easy to find online (and this book isn’t really about making the fortune teller, so that’s a perfectly understandable choice for, I presume, space constraints.)

I really appreciated Kevin Cornell’s terrific art, too, as it charmingly brings the inanimate objects in this book to life. I enjoyed the minivan cameo almost as much as I adore my own minivan, and was appropriately squicked out by the chewed gum. The art and words together give the objects depicted in this book so much character, and I’m super rooting for Forty and Chip to make it all the way to Canada and safety. Forty The Fortune Teller is a delightfully offbeat picture book that deserves a place in any children’s library.

Forty The Fortune Teller by Drew Daywalt & Kevin Cornell was published February 24 2026 by Philomel Books and is available from all good booksellers, including