ROSIE AND ROLLAND IN THE LEGENDARY SHOW-AND-TELL

A child in search of something special to bring to class finds it in a jungle temple—then loses it to a rival.

Discovering most of a torn map in her backpack, Rosie dons her grandpa’s Indiana Jones–style hat, navigates her way to a cabinet in his study, and with her dog, Rolland, goes through it to a wilderness adventure leading to a giant “monkey king” with a glowing golden ball. Up pops sneering classmate Freddy Jones with the rest of the map. He takes the ball from Rosie, leaving her with only the hat for an anticlimactic show and tell the next day. To Freddy, though, the ball is just a rock, so he tosses it aside after school. Rosie picks it up…and that night it begins to glow again. And that’s it. Berg makes the story even less meaningful, if that were possible, by leaving readers to wonder how Rosie and Freddy came by the map—or even what was on Freddy’s portion, since it’s only shown unreadably folded up—as well as how exactly everyone gets back home or why the stolen artifact (which seems to be just a MacGuffin with no actual agency or significance) should glow for one thief but not the other. The art is somewhat better put together than the strung-out plot, though characters’ faces are sometimes distorted.

A bewildering mishmash of unintegrated elements, long as well as incoherent.