Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The book-loving heroine of The Best Book in the World returns for a second outing, a pyrotechnical display of color and line. Sozi, who gains a name this time around, wears a mini-dress, a superhero-style mask, and pigtails. A scatterbrained procrastinator, Sozi has swarms of good ideas, but she can't work out how to capture them. In the story's most charming conceit, her ideas are drawn as creatures with fishlike heads and fluid, flexible bodies; they swim like schools of herring, but can also march in endless lines, like ants. When Sozi gets discouraged ("It was such a big task and she'd much rather play"), her ideas vanish-until a book appears to help her capture them. In an even more startling development, the book eventually swallows Sozi, as well: "Living in a book along with her friends.../ that's the way this story ends." Though Alexander's verse offers little substance, and the story is disjointed, her polished spreads dazzle. Silkscreen-style swoops and swirls of scarlet, navy, teal, and yellow give each page outsize graphic impact. Ages 3-7. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-Sozi is a girl with a big imagination and a lot of great ideas. The problem is that she has a hard time controlling all of her ideas and staying focused long enough to pick just one. Luckily, a large book comes along to help capture Sozi's many ideas within its pages. Sozi begins to write her own book, which makes for a great story about organization and creativity. Unfortunately, the ending, in which the young girl is eaten by the book, is confusing and throws the perceived message off. The rhyming scheme is also odd at times; the meter often feels clunky and changes sporadically, which will make reading aloud frustrating. Alexander's illustrations have a screenprinted style, and her use of minimal colors makes for a "do-it-yourself" feel, but doesn't quite match the creative nature of the story line, as the scenes depicting Sozi's ideas look too flat on the page. VERDICT Although big on imagination, this story feels more like an afterthought than a well-constructed idea.-Peter Blenski, Greenfield Public Library, WI © Copyright 2015. 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
The author of The Best Book in the World (2014), a paean to reading, brings to the art of writing the same over-the-top exuberance.Unfortunately, here that enthusiasm trumps not just logic, but even coherence. Ideasrendered in the dizzyingly bright illustrations as crowds of identical, rubber-limbed homunculi clad only in bathing capsswarm young Sozi's mental landscape by the bucketful. Forming a chorus line, they inspire her to "make a work of art." When she sits down with paper and pencil, though, the ideas wander off or are chased away by an imaginary bear (representing, one supposes, writer's block). Then a helpful codex with eyes and legs slams shut on a fugitive idea and offers it to Sozi, "squished for safekeeping." Charmed by this intellectual roadkill, she joins her new friend in a further harvest of tiny fugitives. She then sets down the beginning and middle of a story that ends with a just, if metafictional, twist when the book squishes her so that she can join "her friends" inside. Centering on a smiling, masked child, the two-tone art, along with being hard on the eyes, blandly ignores the violence of the conceptual conceit. Moreover, the narrative suddenly breaks into labored verse after a mostly prose beginning: "But she kept on regardless. She refused to quit. / When THE END came, that's when she would deal with it!" A perfect storm of ugly imagery, sloppy thinking and subpar writing. (Picture book. 6-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
