BOING!

Inspired perhaps by the superhuman leaps in martial arts or Spiderman movies, Taylor and Ingman follow a champion trampoliner dubbed the “Great Elastic Marvel” as he inadvertently catapults himself out of a high window, then narrowly escapes one deadly fall after another thanks to a pile of mattresses, an awning, and other conveniently placed springy surfaces. Ingram goes for a postmodern, Maira Kalman look, creating variously canted aerial scenes with swaths of violently contrasting color, compressed perspectives, and flat figures delineated by just a few strokes of pen or brush. His art offers some visual energy, but it never quite matches the stomach-dropping vertigo awaiting viewers of Mordicai Gerstein’s Man Who Walked Between the Towers (2003). Having soared all over town, Great Elastic Marvel flies back through his window, crash-lands, and is last seen bouncing merrily through a hospital ward, impeded not at all by a plaster fanny-cast. You just can’t keep a good trampolinist down—but that sense of wild motion isn’t quite there. Good premise, but perhaps more suited to film than paper. (Picture book. 6-8)