THE TOTALLY NOT BORING BOOK OF FEELINGS

Lighthearted verses, many presented in graphic format, feature siblings, monsters, wild creatures, flights of fancy, and daring deeds.

In breezy, loose-jointed rhymes, Taylor moves freely between quotidian and fantasy settings. A sibling’s indignant rejection of a suggestion that little brother Max is “really slow” (“Others see what Max can’t do / but I see what he can”), for instance, is followed by a ballad of a lad so indecisive that he spends 100 years in front of a vending machine and a teacher’s gleeful revelation that she has hairy “monster feet.” The titular theme, which extends to specific labels for many of the poems and a “Feeling Index” at the end, not only includes non-emotions such as “Peer Pressure,” but also arbitrarily assigns just one feeling even to entries that contain several…and sometimes getting it wrong to boot. Still, in a mix of lavishly detailed sequential panels and enveloping single-page illustrations, Dorman catches all sorts of fantastical creatures, joining a large, racially diverse cast of children (including one young wheelchair user) in brisk action. Readers will find them all stimulating company—even a “humdrum” dragon bored with blasting castles who decides to take up a more peaceable hobby (knitting) and the Laziest Lady Ever: “But some people may argue my talent’s a bore / since I’ve laid here so long my face stuck to the floor.”

Strains to fit what feels like a forcibly imposed theme but should nevertheless find fans.