Mystery Book: Animals at the Market?

A father came in with his young son, about age 3-4.  Dad was looking for a picture book that they had read and enjoyed together before, but could not remember the title or the author.  I agreed to play detective to help him find this mystery favorite.  Here's what Dad told me:

"This book was about 7 or 8 different animals - actually, that might have been part of the title.  These animals all went to the market together and the cow drank all the milk, the little dog ate up all the bones...things like that."

The father was also able to show me that he had originally found this book in one of our browsing bins.  He even specifically remembered that it must have been one of three particular bins because they were in the area where his son likes to play.  Since our browsing bins are intended to be sorted roughly by the author's name, this gave me the hint that the author of the book likely had a last name that fell within the C-G range.

None of these clues rang any particular bells with me, so I turned to my friend Novelist K-8.  I started out by using two keywords that I had pulled directly from the father's description of the book:  "animals," and "market."  Typing these two keywords into Novelist's very smart database came back with several hundred possible matches, but after inspecting the first few search results I was able to quickly uncover the book that we were searching for.

The book in question was Eight Animals on the Town by Susan Middleton Elya.  Just as this parent described, this book tells of eight animals who go into town to find some dinner.  They visit the market and each animal finds something good to eat, followed by dancing and the animals' drive home.  What really stands out about this book - and was, interestingly enough, not at all mentioned by this bilingual father - is the way that Spanish words are seamlessly incorporated into the story, both in the text and the illustrations.

Dad was thrilled that I was able to track down the book, and his son was excited to see this favorite story again.  Success!