GRANPA

The jacket drawing of a little girl clinging to her grandfather's shoulders conveys a joyous, adventuresome sharing—but leaves in doubt just what sort of vehicle (a horse-drawn cart, perhaps) they're breezing along in. And the contents—a different shared experience at each opening—are more ambiguous still: deliberately oblique, and inferential. Mostly the pit an adult's matter-of-factness against a child's imaginings. The two are in a greenhouse, where we are supposed to gather from the pictures that Granpa is transplanting seedlings from flats into pots. In Roman type (implicitly, Granpa): "There will not be room for all the little seeds to grow." In italics (implicitly, the little girl): "Do worms go to heaven?" To an adult ear, that may sound a cute non sequitur; most children are apt to take it as simple woolly-headedness. Another scene, one of the simpler to explain, has the pair looking out of the house in a rainstorm: "Noah knew the ark was not far from land when he saw the dove carrying the olive branch," says Granpa; "Could we float away in this house, Granpa?" says the little girl. Then, overleaf, he's saying—with no connection whatever: "That was not a nice thinS to say to Granpa." And at the last we have a mini-sequence, totally unforeshadowed, in which Granpa sits in his chair, sick; takes the little girl on his lap; and vanishes, presumed dead (!), as we see her silently gazing at his empty chair. There are ways to make scattered moments, and tenuous feelings, add up—but only in the pictures does the relationship register here.