EVERY HERE HAS A THERE

A shipment of books from Hong Kong to New York City provides a focus for this exploration of cargo transport via container ship.

The red-and-black hull of the ship commands attention against white or pale-gray backgrounds as it’s piled high with blue, orange, green, and gray containers. The color scheme and graphical simplicity inevitably recall Donald Crews’ Freight Train (1978), as does the ship’s unvarying left-to-right orientation and its visual dominance of nearly every single double-page spread. Linn’s text takes two forms: a simple narrative of the action depicted on the page (“Tugboats point the bow of the ship out toward the Pacific Ocean”) and two patterned statements per spread, each containing a pair of, usually, opposite terms: “Every PULL has a PUSH. Every OFF has an ON.” Most of these opposing concepts are clearly illustrated; for instance, the tugboats, tiny against the enormous ship, embody push and pull. Others invite conversation: The containers are clearly on the ship, but what is off? The ship’s four-week journey takes it through the “engineering wonder” that is the Panama Canal; its “series of canal locks” is depicted in cross-section, but it will be up to adult readers to explain exactly what locks are or how they work, since no glossary or other backup information is included.

Given the ubiquity of container transport, this arresting effort is a necessary addition to things-that-go shelves.