Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 3^-6. There's a beautiful stillness in this picture book for older readers, in the exquisite timbre and tempo of the language and in the radiant purity of the images. An artist named Max lives upstairs from a boy in a city by the water. The boy loves to spend the afternoons in Max's apartment, reading and dreaming as Max paints. Sometimes the boy plays the violin for Max. Secretive about his work, Max does not let the boy see the pictures. When Max goes away, he asks the boy to take in the mail and water his plants, and when the boy goes to the apartment, he finds that all of the paintings have been left for him to look at, each with a mysterious caption from Max. Max returns only to move away permanently, but later he sends the boy another painting with images that yoke together the boy's music, the stories the boy and Max shared, and Max's big red chair. By the end, we know that the boy has become an adult and is looking back on a precious incident in his childhood, telling about it in understated rhythms that impart the meaning of creativity and the importance of art in human experience in terms that children will intuitively grasp. The pictures draw readers into a place of dreams, where the light of morning touches a wrapped present bigger than a house and where paintings of tigers and apples float cheerfully on Venetian doorways. Magical, reassuring, glorious. --GraceAnne A. DeCandido
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Like its opening image of a seagull suspended at twilight and painted in sepia tones, this extraordinary volume honors the beauty inherent in a singular momentary experience. "At dusk, when he couldn't draw anymore, Max used to sing," begins Buch-olz's (Sleep Well, Little Bear) poignant tale of an unusual friendship. Max is a painter, the self-proclaimed "collector of moments." The narrator, a boy, lives two floors down and plays the violin. At Max's invitation, he joins the artist every evening for an intimate concert. The boy often visits at other times, but the artist never permits the boy to view his work: "One invisible and unique path leads into every picture... and the artist has to find just that one path. He can't show the picture too soon, or he might lose that path forever," Max explains. But when Max goes away for a stretch, both boy and readers are invited for a private showing of 13 breathtaking paintings. Many of the subjects are mythical: "Snow elephants in Canada" nearly invisible against blizzard-filled skies, a circus wagon floating above a bridge in France. Others, like Max's self-portrait, are realistic. But all the paintings, with their wide expanse of space, suggest a vast universe; in the words of the narrator, "Max always captured a precise moment. But I understood that there was always a story attached to this moment which had begun long before and would continue long afterward." The boy pores over each picture and instructs readers by his power of example. Only near the end of the book does the boy learn how much he has meant to Max--and his realization is transformative. With the same exquisite crafting that Bucholz exhibits in his paintings, he sculpts each section of prose--aided greatly by Neumeyer's fluid translation. Whether young or old, readers will never view a work of art in the same way again. All ages. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-6-Evocative is the word here. Despite a lengthy text, there is no plot in this oversized illustrated book. The narrator, a boy nicknamed "Professor," tells of the time that an artist, Max, lived in the flat above his. The boy, a loner, reads while Max draws, and plays his violin while the artist sings. When the man leaves for a while, Professor is allowed for the first time to see his enigmatic pictures. Through the summer the boy explores their possible meanings. The artist returns only to announce a move far away; later, a picture of Professor arrives with Max's assurance that the boy's music continues to inhabit his work. The clear, meticulous, full-page paintings are suffused with calm. In most, an odd element is obvious but not intrusive: a circus wagon floating in air at the edge of the frame, penguins in the street, a lion in a boat, or a horse atop a lighthouse. In others, there is a striking disproportion: Is that boy a Goliath, or is the boy with him a Tom Thumb? Although Max says that "one invisible and unique path leads into every picture," these collected moments appear to have infinite points of entry and egress. Against the muted, atmospheric backgrounds, an occasional touch of crimson glows as mysteriously as this book.-Patricia Lothrop-Green, St. George's School, Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2010. 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 Horn Book Review
As in Van Allsburg's [cf2]The Mysteries of Harris Burdick[cf1], an artist goes away and leaves behind cryptic, captioned examples of his work for others to interpret. But in this case, the quietly surreal paintings are a little too over-extolled by the young narrator who views them, giving readers less room to form their own opinions in what degenerates into a rather pretentious and wordy philosophical exercise. From HORN BOOK Spring 2000, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In the manner of Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), Buchholz has created an intriguing story with illustrations that are surreal and strangely mythic. Max, an artist, comes one warm March day to live in the apartment above the first-person narrator's home, in a town that could be anywhere on a European coastline. His stay will be temporary but his impact on the narrator, whom he calls ``Professor,'' is lasting. In fact, the lonely young violinist (now a professor) tells this story in retrospective, almost elegiac tones and because he places such value on the artist's friendly presence, readers don't want Max to go, either. They will want to see those paintings of what he calls ``moments'' as much as the narrator does. When the boy sees the paintings, he recalls snippets of the artist's conversation that appear as captions for the art: ``Snow elephants in Canada. It lasts just for the blink of an eye'' and ``The evening before, the circus had given its farewell performance.'' He is often in the paintings, glimpsed from the back, or in profile, and his lesson may be that the moment he has collected in a painting includes the past, present, and future'true, finally, of his last work, of the narrator. By the end, readers have shared what's important in the journey of Max, and to the boy whose friendship has been part of his observed life. (Picture book. 6+)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
