IN THIS BOOK ARE THINGS IN THINGS

The French duo that collaborated on the foldout book Panorama (2009) returns with another visually exciting collection of images, this time bound traditionally.

Each page—and an occasional double-page spread—contains a linocut presenting an arresting, tactile composition. A white bird rests in a nest built from chiseled diagonals, short blue lines cradling the creature against the black tree; a train, inferable from the clues of distant lights in a tunnel, approaches readers from under an arch of brown bricks above, with pebbles and track below. There is much to peruse and describe with a baby or by a young child, and readers in the know will recognize animals from Jolivet’s previous books. The text, however, is less successful. The need for the repetitive first-person declarations is questionable: “I am in the apricot, said the pit. / I am in the bed, said the teddy bear”). Perhaps the somnolent syntax is intended to induce the sleep depicted in the final scene of a father holding his son, who’s clasping a book—this book. Maybe it is all meant to climax in the resulting multiple meanings of “And me, I am in your arms!”

Minus variance in prepositions, relationship among pages or discernible story arc (except for a conclusion), this feels more like a museum stroll than a coherent picture book—stimulating but not wholly satisfying. (Picture book. 3-5)