Review by Booklist Review
Has anyone ever seen a Toy Story movie and felt that toys having a life of their own and scurrying about when you can't see them actually might not be a good thing? French writer-artist Blanquet apparently had a similar thought, as evidenced by this eerie import in which a basement full of ravaged and discarded toys kidnap children who stray into their path and feed them to a mountainous monster formed of a thousand broken toys. While the two children in this story manage to escape such a fate, and the Twilight Zone-lite ending could have been eschewed in favor of something less clichéd, Blanquet's stylized and exaggerated figures have a Charles Burns-for-middle-schoolers creepiness and weight. Younger readers may view their toy chests in an unhappy new light, but for a slightly older group this is a great journey into the weird and an inheritor of a proud legacy handed down from the likes of Roald Dahl's The BFG (1982) and Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (1961).--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
