THE DOOR THAT HAD NEVER BEEN OPENED BEFORE

A door that remains stubbornly closed challenges three children to take extreme measures.

Fresh from demonstrating How To Eat a Book (2022), the three Grunion children, all of whom have skin the white of the page—persistent Sheila, her cousin Gerald (who has a secret), and his hot-tempered twin, Geraldine—return to tackle the one locked door in their many, many-doored house. Making metaphorical if not literal sense, their fruitless assaults culminate at last in a tussle over a hammer that puts a crack in the door, through which a vine shoots to fill up the house completely. But, it turns out, the key has been stuck to Gerald’s sole (soul?) all along, and when the frantic children open the door to escape, an ever-expanding “Land of Never Before” (the future, get it?) is revealed to entice them onward. Grown-ups, at least, will appreciate the artful symbolism, but younger audiences are more likely to take the wild rumpus so engagingly captured in the distinctive illustrations more to heart. Composed in heavy unfilled lines on paper cutouts floating in low-relief layers with shadows left visible, the pictures brim with life and give convincing depth to the house’s high-ceilinged rooms and narrow halls. The rhythmic, occasionally rhymed narrative’s free-wheeling typography adds verbal drama to the visual ruckus, to boot.

A lock for enthusiastic responses and demands for repeat performances.