Wonderful and inspiring pictures in this book! ( )

Beautiful book, but some children might find some of the images confusing or scary. I found I needed to be careful with my tone - reading it lightly and happily. If I slowed it down too much, it became a bit spooky. ( )

This book take you on a journey to think past what you see at first. It makes you use your imagination as well. I feel as though this book make you think like a child does when they are playing. I enjoyed this book and would have it in my personal and classroom libraries. I would suggest this book to other teachers as well as an art teacher to see what type of project she would ask the children to do. ( )

This is the first of 3 books by Sarah Thomson, illustrated by Rob Gonsalves, that I own. I recently discovered that there is a fourth in this series, which will be added to my collection soon.

Although Thomson is American, Gonsalves is Canadian and I am including these books as Canadian reads, for my own purpose of reading more Canadian books this year. 2 of the 3 have won a GG (Governor General) award, a Canadian award for excellence and distinction in literature.

Gonsalves' artwork is described as magic realism and is somewhat reminiscent of Escher or Magritte but in my opinion, his work is much more ethereal yet photographic, at the same time. He studied and worked as an architect as well and that comes through in the work, too. His images are so evocative, so imaginative, and, together with the short poetic words of Thomson, make these books absolutely mesmerizing. I wondered which came first: did Gonsalves read the words and interpret them in his images or did Thomson see the art and interpret it in her words? But in this, the first book, it does say, at the end, that the images came first, and inspired the word.

Just so beautiful... ( )

I did not find this as charming as the other two.  The theme of transformations, in the pictures, was more obvious, and didn't necessarily match the text very well.  Also, many images were creepy. ( )