Children's book writer and illustrator Janet Stevens of Boulder often deals in the extraordinary, the exotic, the foreign and the fantastic.

But when she was asked by her publisher to consider illustrating "To Market, To Market," a comical extension of the old song by Anne Miranda, Stevens thought maybe it was time to explore her own "mythology" for a change. She agreed to do the book, then decided to set it in her own messy kitchen and her neighborhood grocery store, North Boulder's Ideal Market.

"The whole thing about setting the story in Boulder is that I had done so many folktales about other cultures, I really wanted to do this in my culture," said Stevens, 44, who lives in North Boulder with her husband, two children, three cats and a dog. "And this is my culture, the mundane side of life."

But there's nothing mundane about the book, released this month by Harcourt Brace and already in a second printing. Black and white photographs of Ideal Market form the backdrop as Stevens' eccentric shopper returns again and again to buy a pig, cow, fish, chicken, and all kinds of animals. By the conclusion, the animals gain the run of the household and the woman goes back to buy vegetables to make soup for all her new furred and feathered friends.

Stevens laughingly refers to the book as her "vegetarian manifesto."

"We are really excited about it. It's absolutely adorable," said Dianna Williams, operations manager for the store, which is displaying blowups of the animal characters and selling the book. "And it's really neat that she is a customer and a neighbor of the store. It ties into what we are all about, a neighborhood market."

Stevens asked permission to use the store as a backdrop about two years ago and took black and white photographs of both the interior and exterior. She intended to use them as models, but they ended up as computer scanned photos because she liked their juxtaposition with her brightly colored illustrations.

"I wanted to keep the black and white so Id have a sort of fantasy-reality thing happening," she said. Plus, the stores humble architecture lent a "nice 50s feel" and helped to set the story in the "real world."

Stevens is the author and illustrator of the 1996 Caldecott Honor book "Tops & Bottoms" and the illustrator of "The Gates of the Wind" by Kathryn Lasky, along with a number of other popular picture books. She is at work on her newest book, "Theres a Big Dog in My House," about the arrival of her real-life dog Violet Samantha Scarlett OHara (her 12-year-old son Blake insists its just Violet) through the eyes of Merl, one of the family cats. She says her experience with "To Market, To Market" taught her a valuable lesson.

"I didn't think I had a culture, but this is it. I found my culture here at Ideal," she laughed. "This book is a real kind of statement on my modern self, where I shop and my messy home."