Gonna roll the bones

As an art student, Caldecott medalist Wiesner (The Three Pigs) created a visual version of Lieber's novelette about a craps game with Death: the "bones" here double as dice and the opponent's skeletal body. In this moody exercise in sepia pencil on yellowed vellum, the artist supplements his fledgling effort with some new sketches. "Guess I'll roll the bones tonight," Joe Slattermill tells his mother and his wife. He moseys down to The Boneyard, a gambling den in a shadowy street that might be in a tenement neighborhood or the Wild West. At the craps table sit a fat casino boss named Mr. Bones and a mysterious Big Gambler with a "smooth white forehead" and eyes "like black holes." As Joe expertly shoots the dice and purposefully trips up to give the Big Gambler a turn, he finds himself in a duel for his soul. Smoky, decadent cabaret scenes alternate with ominous imagery of his grim rival, and the tale ends ambiguously when Joe loses his match (Death cheats) and takes "the long way [home]... around the world." Wiesner's horizontal landscape format and cinematic storyboard sequences-with gestures and movement evolving over several frames or even within a single sketch-prefigure his work in books such as Tuesday. The autumnal sketch-like illustrations, in contrast to the foreboding cover image in frosty green and gray-blue, demonstrate the evolution of his artwork. His tastes have evolved too, along with a sense of his young readership; collectors are the likeliest audience for this eerie tale. Ages 6-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Gr 6 Up-Joe Slattermill is a gambling man who has an uncanny encounter with the Big Gambler in his town's new gaming parlor, The Boneyard. Leiber's fantasy novelette, greatly reduced and lightened in this picture-book adaptation, won the 1967 Nebula Award and the 1968 Hugo Award. Wiesner's sometimes smudgy pencil drawings on browned acrylic have the faded look of very long ago, though the text notes that "Far in the distance, Joe could see a faint glow of gas flares and blue lights and neon pink tubes, all jeering at the stars where the spaceships flew." Joe's attempt to out-gamble the Grim Reaper-type figure is both spooky and somewhat predictable. He loses his soul in a wager with the Big Gambler, and after a final physical skirmish, the skeletal figure crumbles and all turns to dust as though it had been but a dream. Yet, there's an intentionally nebulous and open-ended conclusion. The somber pictures sometimes have suggestive shapes and details, mixing light and dark, indistinct areas contrasting with more clearly drawn figures. The bleak look suits the darker tone of Leiber's original text. Sometimes the pictures contradict details mentioned in the text. The book may find an audience with older reluctant readers, and it could serve as an introduction to the longer fantasy works of Leiber. Larger collections will want it as a very different work by Wiesner.-Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.