Review by Booklist Review
Ages 7-12. Clutching a large, leatherbound volume, a boy sleeps. As he slumbers, the book-an atlas-tumbles from his grasp, opening his dreams to the exotically historical locales represented between its covers. With meticulous refinement and unbridled imagination, Wiesner charts the youth's course, as objects magically transform into different images with the turn of each page: the boy's plaid blanket breezily billows into a patchwork of farm fields that, in turn, regiment themselves into a chessboard whose figures greet the pajama-clad visitor. Crossing the board into a medieval castle whose winding stone walls startlingly evolve into a menacing dragon and whose turrets become tall trees, the youngster escapes the fearful beast in a forest of books where the dragon is squashed between pages until only his tail remains dangling like a limp bookmark from a closed volume. Riding a pig's back along a canyon ledge, falling through air amid tumbling map pages and slices of mountains and city buildings, the boy floats back to bed aboard a swan, while around him are strewn the diverse elements incorporated into his bizarre dream. Reminiscent of Salvador Dali's surrealistic paintings and at times of Gulliver's Travels and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, this wordless journey into the mind's fantasies-at one point the map pages even chart regions of the brain rather than areas of the world-needs textual grounding to guide children through its remarkable spreads; the brief verse on the dust jacket isn't a satisfactory compass through the maze of this brilliant illustrator's imagination. But older and gifted children may well relish the challenge of interpretation, while the sheer artistry will intrigue all ages. EM. Dreams-Fiction / Stories without words [CIP] 87-22834
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wiesner creates a wonderful dream sequence in a wordless exploration that makes the picture book format seem limitless. Gray-and-green gingham squares of a sleeping boy's coverlet flow into the patchwork fields of a landscape, with mountains in the blue-green distance. Onto this checked ground, figures like chess pieces appear, pages turn to castles and turrets with knights and moatsstill using the shapes and colors of the first bedroom scene. The dreaming boy, clad in his pajamas, visits castles and slays a mottled green dragon. Next he sprawls like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, and then journeys into an urban dreamland: tenements instead of castles, rooftops with aerials instead of parapets. A last ride up on a swan's back, over a green-checked seascape of waves and shadows brings him ashore, and back to his bed. This unbroken dreamscape is artfully carried through a blending of ancient and modern motifs; the book is an exceptional choice for children and visually enticing for older readers as well. Ages 6-10. (April) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 3-After a dream transports a boy into a human chess game, through a castle, past a dragon, and over Escher-inspired seascapes, he awakens to find himself surrounded by the objects that morphed during sleep. With the multiple meanings suggested by the title and a richly drawn world, repeated readings are repaid. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In an imaginative wordless picture book, Wiesner (illustrator of Kite Flyer, 1986) tours a dream world suggested by the books and objects in a boy's room. A series of transitions--linked by a map in the book that the boy was reading as he fell asleep--wafts him, pajama-clad, from an aerial view of hedge-bordered fields to a chessboard with chess pieces, some changing into their realistic counterparts (plus a couple of eerie roundheaded figures based on pawns that reappear throughout); next appear a castle; a mysterious wood in which lurks a huge, whimsical dragon; the interior of a neoclassical palace; and a series of fantastic landscapes that eventually transport the boy back to his own bed. Most interesting here are the visual links Wiesner uses in his journey's evolution; it's fun to trace the many details from page to page. There's a bow to Van Allsburg, and another to Sendak's Night Kitchen, but Wiesner's broad double-spreads of a dream world--whose muted colors suggest a silent space outside of time--have their own charm. Intriguing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
