Once Upon a Book. Grace Lin and Kate Messner. 2023. [February] 40 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: Alice was tired of heavy sweaters and thick socks and staying inside with nothing to do. "I wish I were someplace that wasn't so frozen and gray!" she grumbled to her mother. She began to stomp away, but something flapped nearby. It was the pages of a book. Curious, Alice began to read.
Premise/plot: Alice, our protagonist, spends the afternoon [or morning, or day] IN a book--literally and figuratively. The illustrations show her stepping right into a book and truly LIVING and EXPERIENCING the action/story of the book[s]. She goes from story to story meeting all sorts of characters--mainly animals, if not exclusively animals. Her landscape is ever-changing.
My thoughts: I wanted to love this one. I did. I love, love, love books about books. I didn't quite love this one despite me wanting to absolutely do so. I think that is mainly all on me. It is not at all fair to judge a book based on your expectations, what you want the book to be. But the book I desperately wanted this one to be would have Alice stepping into familiar books and stories--meeting characters, being thrown into stories. Instead, it was almost let's travel the globe and learn about different habitats and animals. Yet it wasn't even quite that. [Not nonfiction-y enough to be an informative book]. The illustrations were bright, bold, colorful.
An artistic choice that I personally didn't love was Alice's ever-changing dress. She starts off with a dress imprinted with words. But her dress blends into EVERY landscape. It changes with each story. At first glance--at least my first glance--it looks like arms, legs, head and shoulders--just floating disconnected. Again, that could be 100% just me. Yes, upon a double-take I saw she was still wearing a block-y dress. But it was distracting/disconcerting to me. Again a nitpicky thing. I probably am the only reader who will feel this way.
© 2023 Becky Laney of Young Readers
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