BOOK

This book quietly praises reading as a path to imaginative adventures while also taking several gentle swipes at high-tech gadgetry.

“And when your time comes to a close and the other world begins to call, don’t worry.” No, this close-to-the-final-page sentence does not refer to death but to leaving one’s book life for what some call “real life.” The beginning of the book makes it clear that a book is “quiet” and “ordinary”—“No buttons. No bonus levels”—until “you learn to look closer….” Thoughtful, poetic phrases are well-matched by mixed-media artwork that includes scraps of typed words in French and English, some of which are authors’ names. A black-haired Caucasian child in a red-and-white–striped shirt moves through a nonthreatening, fantastical world where “imagination scrapes the skies of opportunity, / the forests of what-could-be stretch beyond the horizon, // and the friends of fact and fiction make believe all night long under the milky stars of possibility.” Pastel skies lead to firefly-bedecked nights, adding a bedtime story’s allure. If this book is published as an e-book or app, some of its appeal will give way to irony. Its humor lies in such digs as, “It will never be sick, because viruses can’t catch it. // It will never go dark, because it doesn’t need batteries.”

One of the prettiest paeans to the codex in recent memory.