MERL AND JASPER'S SUPPER CLUB

A quick and curious episode from Rankin (The Handmade Alphabet, 1991). Ann sits at her table drawing a cat and dog at a dinner table, but she is called to her own dinner before she has time to draft victuals on the table of her artwork. A gust of wind blows the cat and dog, Merl and Jasper, off the paper and onto the floor where they scrounge around in Ann's books in search of food: That porridge looks good, but a couple of bears scare them off; there's a feast next to some big beans, but a giant appears and sends them scurrying; a witch precludes a gingerbread snack; four and twenty blackbirds interrupt a pie sampling. At last the two cannily devise a way to sup back home on steak and spaghetti with meatballs, by picking up the markers themselves and applying pen to paper. Merl and Jasper remain as bare, black-and-white outlines in the more textured, finished world of Ann's room and the books. In this free-spirited romp through the transporting world of fairy tales, Merl and Jasper eat up, or at least try to, these stories as avidly as young readers do, turning the whole process neatly on its head. Rankin's book, like Chris Van Allsburg's Bad Day at Riverbend (1995), sagely mirrors children's notions about what is real and what is not. (Picture book. 3-7)