A BOOK

A family wakes up when you open this book, yawning and stretching and looking up at you. They live right there between the two covers, and now their hyper-metafictive day has begun. Everyone but the little girl has a different story: The father works as a juggling clown, the mother is a fire fighter, the brother plans to explore space—even the cat’s off to hunt mice. The little girl dashes across the succeeding pages in search of her own story, led by a motherly goose. Gerstein’s awkward aerial perspective forces readers to look mostly at the tops of the foreshortened characters’ heads and crane their necks to assess busy page spreads. Moments when characters gaze up and connect with the reading audience offer brief thrills, but allusions to nursery rhymes, folktales, mystery and adventure genres as possible stories for the girl hit readers in such fast succession they may well dizzy. The girl’s ultimate decision to write her own story until bedtime provides an ending to this disorienting and undeniably clever novelty, for whom the natural audience is unclear. (Picture book. 7-10)