SUPPOSING...

New illustrations buff up a classic set of provocative proposals.

Matched to its fourth set of pictures (these drawn from a 2018 Portuguese edition), Reid’s 1960 thought experiments have lost none of their ability to jump-start flights of fancy—for better or worse. Some—“Supposing there were 12 of me…” or “Supposing I taught my dog how to read…”—are fun and relatively innocuous. Others foment real or fancied revenge on rude librarians and other grown-ups (“Supposing my Aunt Mabel came to tea and said to me how big I was getting, for the millionth time, and I just stared back and said to her: How old you’re getting...”), and others envision empowering acts like saving Dad from financial ruin (again, 1960) or helping to recapture an escaped lion. A few entries are potentially disquieting, though (“Supposing I went bald…”), and the closer, “Supposing I went blank…,” printed on a white page, is an open invitation to existential dread. Period details (mostly) and a graphic style with flattened perspectives and thin, overlaid colors lend Yoon’s illustrations an appropriately mid-20th-century look. Human figures, most of which are children, are stylized enough to make racial identities ambiguous.

Supposing…a new generation of readers took this invitation to heart to write themselves into different stories?