A FISH TALE

Yerxa (Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall, 1994) paints with expressive clarity, creating scenes children will love, but his words seem to be the work of a storyteller who is winking at adults in the back row. A young fish, enrolled in and failing dart school, narrates the story of his attempts to hook into heaven, led by a smooth-talking fish named Jack. It's a trip that brings him perilously close to winding up in a frying pan, and one that is riddled with words such as mystical, instinctively, and involvement, as well as insightful deliberations, none of which are elucidated by the context. Complicated descriptions of the narrator's state of mind nearly defeat the simple beauty of a single watercolor. (Picture book. 4-8)