A Book - Mordicai Gerstein

Roaring Brook Press
April 2009
$16.95
40 pgs.
for: Kids
Rating: 4.5
Endpapers: The same blue as the cover

Clever and different. I do appreciated clever and different.

The reader has a birds-eye view of all the activity in the book. We're looking DOWN at the action - as if we were the sun - and Gerstein has even drawn the shadows that are being made. The characters know you're there - and they know they're only a family that exists in the book. Everyone knows their own story - the father's a clown, the mother's a fire fighter, the brother wants to be an astronaut - but the young girl goes looking for her own, unknown story. She travels through different genres - fairy tale, mystery, adventure, historical fiction, science fiction - until she goes home to decide to become an author and write her own story!

At the beginning and end of the book are double-pages spreads of black pages - you can see the imprints of the beds - because "when the book was closed it was night in the book, and the family slept."