CLINTON GREGORY’S SECRET

In tribute to unfettered imaginations everywhere, Whatley introduces a smiling lad with an inner life so filled with adventure that even a day of “nothing much at all” brings handmade paper hats for a ship full of pirates, a rocket voyage to the Moon and a trip around the world on plates of spaghetti. Everywhere he goes, Clinton travels with a large entourage that includes a dragon named Gordon, a pair of ruddy-nosed giants, a seahorse, a triceratops in a pink tutu and others—all rendered with massive, finely detailed solidity in the eye-filling art, and all (except the spaghetti) visible, in variously reduced forms, scattered about his room in the opening spread. Children whose own rooms are self-contained universes will feel perfectly at home in Clinton’s; for storytime flights, pair this with, Simon Puttock’s Earth to Stella! (2006), one of Harold’s forays with his purple crayon. (Picture book. 6-8)