COME, READ WITH ME

A fast flight through the settings of famous children’s stories.

This title begins with the happy faces of two young children—one with dark-brown skin and curly black hair and the other with lighter-brown skin and straight black hair. As the pages go by, the children explore the imaginary lands of famous fairy tales and stories. Full of smiles, the two friends travel through sea and air, pass castles and candy houses, and have tea in Wonderland. While the illustrations are double-page spreads pleasingly full of color and detail, it is the syncopation (or lack thereof) that makes the story awkward. “And a jungle of wild things who march to their very own beat. / Oh, the places we’ll go, the things you will meet.” With an uneven meter, the verses defy easy scansion. The literary references scale from short nursery rhymes, like “Humpty Dumpty” for the very young, to complex stories for older readers, like Charlotte’s Web and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The two characters just observe these places while the references whiz by, with up to five stories mentioned on a page; when copyrighted characters are depicted, they (appropriately) often look nothing like what children familiar with them will expect. Despite the potential for confusion, this title does pay homage to the wonderful world of imagination found in children’s books.

This bird’s-eye view of famous fictional settings is not without its turbulent moments.