Clydeo is making peanut butter cookies when his mouth glues itself shut. He cannot speak. He tries the whole family and nobody understands a word he is not saying, and thirty two pages turns out to be exactly the right length for a joke that good.

The pages carry it. One reads that the peanut butter was super sticky, opposite a full page of Clydeo with both paws clamped over his muzzle and his eyes enormous. He writes a note instead, and his second cousin squints at it and answers that he cannot read the handwriting, which leaves Clydeo sad on page 21 with nobody understanding him. Earlier he had thought out loud about playing ball, and the facing page imagines exactly how that ends, in a thought bubble with an angry face at a smashed window.

This is Jennifer Aniston's first I Can Read, starring her own food loving dog, and Bruno Jacob draws Clydeo as a genuine shaggy mop of a terrier rather than a cartoon outline. Level 1 means short sentences and familiar words, for a child starting to sound out a page alone.

Paperback, 32 pages, 6 by 9 in (229 by 153 mm), by Jennifer Aniston, illustrated by Bruno Jacob. HarperCollins, January 2026. ISBN-13 9780063372405. Reading level: I Can Read Level 1. Publisher age guidance: 4 to 8.

Two more Level 1 readers are on the same shelf: Pete the Cat Goes Camping and Pete the Cat Saves Up.

If Level 1 is still a stretch, Pete the Cat: Sir Pete the Brave is one rung easier at My First, the tier meant to be read together.