Lisa Bentley’s 2025 picture book I Am NOT Your Hat! is a bright and vivid book. Burt is an oversized bird–an ostrich, by appearance–who likes to walk around wearing his much smaller bird-friend Dot on his head. Other birds praise Burt for his lovely hat, but Dot isn’t pleased at being considered Burt’s hat. There’s some grumbling on Dot’s hat, and then a verbal explosion that fills two pages with Burt’s bright, irate plumage, and then Dot leaves, exposing the scraggly orange hair (why a bird has hair isn’t really explained) Burt had been hiding.
Burt misses his friend, and goes looking. That search is a bit odd, as Burt eventually finds a field filled with dozens of apparently almost identical birds, and has to search each one to see if it is Dot, even going so far as trying each one on his head.
If the birds are really friends, that seems a bit dismissive. However, when Burt finds Dot, and the two resume their relationship under new terms, with a new and more balanced, more mutual definition, the book ends up teaching solid lessons about friendship.
But I suspect kids will like it more for the images of a big bird wearing a little bird as a hat.
