THE ROOM OF WONDERS

In a second solo outing as opaque as The Little Giant (2004), a pack rat with a huge collection of curiosities starts over after momentarily losing focus. Depicted as a small, ski-nosed rodent with sunken shoulders, Pius Pelosi slouches through city and country picking up oddly shaped roots and leaves, lost items and interesting bric-a-brac, until he’s filled all the shelves in a mammoth display hall. But after visitors complain that the collection’s oldest item, a plain pebble, is too ordinary, he throws it out, suddenly sinks into depression and gives everything away. Then one day he finds another pebble, and that rekindles his urge to collect. Readers might enjoy poring over the dozens of often inscrutable items on Pius’s shelves in the softly colored cartoons, but his emotional ups and downs seem puzzlingly arbitrary—particularly next to those of the notable young collectors in Marthe Jocelyn’s Hannah’s Collections (2000), Carey Armstrong-Ellis’s Prudy’s Problem and How She Solved It (2002), or, on a more rarefied but still comprehensible plane, Quint Buchholz’s Collector of Moments (1999). (Picture book. 6-8)