Book Description
for The Red Book by Barbara Lehman
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
A playful and intriguing wordless book begins with a girl walking down a snowy street. A red book protruding from a snowbank catches her eye and she picks it up. At school, she opens it, and inside she sees (and we see) a map, an island, and a boy in progressively tighter close ups. The next page (of her book—of ours?) shows the boy up close, on a tropical looking island. He spies a red book protruding from the sand. He opens it to pages showing a snowy urban landscape. And a girl—at a desk—looking up disbelief. Barbara Lehman’s visual fantasy is a statement on the power of imagination, and the power of literature to transport one into another place and time. It’s also a pure delight, with a satisfying and impossible journey, and an ending that suggests the magic will live on. Lehman’s watercolor, gouache and ink illustrations are clean-lined, simple and perfect to tell the tale. (Ages 5–10)
CCBC Choices 2005 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2005. Used with permission.