A CHILD OF BOOKS

A young girl reader helps a boy discover the imaginative art of stories in this insightful, intertextual ode to literary curiosity.

“I am a child of books. / I come from a world of stories.” So says the nameless girl narrator as she sits and reads on a raft that floats atop a sea made up of words from various classic books. She sails a wave and approaches an awestruck boy to whisk him away. Following a trail of words pulled from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—an apt inclusion—the girl leads him into a world of adventures. Jeffers and Winston's mixed-media artwork, an inventive combination of watercolor, pencil, and digital collage, elicits strong notice from readers. Jeffers’ uneven, hand-lettered text contrasts dramatically with Winston’s digitally manipulated lines of classic prose. Collaged-in photos of actual books share space beside drawn buildings and act as tree trunks in a forest; sentences and lines taken from a diverse set of stories populate each spread, bowing to gravity or bursting from the world in unexpected ways. “For this is our world / we’ve made from stories…” sums it all up. Readers may find themselves smiling along. The girl wears her dark hair in pigtails and is depicted as either blue or paper-white, and the boy is also paper-white, with wavy, short hair.

An ingenious, confident, and pretty cool exploration of literary delight.