Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 3-5. This book's title reads like a command: Leave reality behind and enjoy these pages of optical wonderments. Children will need to bring their own stories to Messenger's spectacles--minutely detailed, colored-pencil-and-watercolor images of fantastical landscapes, faces, and animals. The brief text suggests ways to interact with the images, such as visualizing a slightly altered familiar world (a teapot without a spout) or the completely fantastical: Imagine a land where giants can be found, read the words below a lush, medieval landscape in which giants' faces are hidden among castles and hills. Cleverly constructed gatefolds, wheels, and flaps allow children to create gloriously unexpected animals and humans by matching up bodies and heads, and small, inset visual puzzles offer more interactive fun. The number of movable, tearable paper parts will make this a challenge for library circulation, but teachers and children alike will delight in the beautiful, accomplished images and the open invitation to drift between rules of logic and the exhilarating freedom of make-believe. --Gillian Engberg Copyright 2006 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Norman Messenger's paper-over-board Imagine, animals morph into each other with the flip of a flaps; people exchange features with the turn of a wheel, and pictures of places are not what they seem in this illustrated book that challenges perception ("Imagine... a door without a room. Would you be indoors or outdoors?"). Puzzles, riddles and provocative ideas brim from the pages. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Horn Book Review
(Primary, Intermediate) Perhaps we should have tucked this review amidst the holiday titles (see pages 691-698): while Imagine has no seasonal theme, it's exactly the book to keep kids occupied while the adults are still asleep. There is no plot; instead, each double-page spread prods viewers to reconsider reality for a moment or two, imagining, for example, a teapot sans spout, a chair minus the legs, a house without windows: ""You wouldn't know if it was day or not."" Printed on thick coated stock, some of the spreads feature simple but effective paper engineering, with pages that fold to reveal variously morphed imaginary beasts, or a center disc that turns to create thirty-six entertainingly incongruous faces. The disparate concepts are unified by their deceptive simplicity and by the elegant colored-pencil and watercolor realizations of the surreal examples, looking as gently mysterious as a Magritte. A tidy English countryside reveals all manner of inconsistencies; a dainty, curly-headed doll becomes a rather fastidious ogre; even a bicycle with square wheels looks snappy and ready to race. As a bonus, each page features a small inset paper-and-pencil puzzle; solutions are hidden under a flap on the optically illusive endpapers. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Here Messenger elaborates on the split-page, mix-and-match format of his Making Faces (1993) and Famous Faces (1995) with additional special effects, including fold-over flaps, a paper wheel and extravagantly detailed landscapes with hidden figures or impossible perspectives. For all his theme and technical expertise, though, "imagination" is in rather short supply; the text often falls flat--"Imagine a teapot without a spout . . . You would get very thirsty." "Imagine a face without a mouth . . . A kiss would be such a disappointment"--and many of the visuals rely on distortion rather than illusion or clever misdirection. Readers fond of picking out subtle changes between two ostensibly identical scenes, or creating portmanteau animals with flips of flaps will enjoy this--but not even the running set of visual puzzles tucked into tiny boxes in the corners will engage children past a once-over. (Picture book. 6-9) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
