Imagine a place

Sarah L. Thomson

Book - 2008

Illustrations and evocative text show how imagination can reveal the extraordinary in the everyday.

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Children's Room Show me where

jE/Thomson
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Location Call Number   Status
Children's Room jE/Thomson Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Picture books
Published
New York, N.Y. : Atheneum Books for Young Readers c2008.
Language
English
Main Author
Sarah L. Thomson (author)
Edition
1st edition
Physical Description
1 volume : color illustrations ; 29 cm
ISBN
9781416968023
Contents unavailable.
Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 2-6-The creators of Imagine a Night (2003) and Imagine a Day (2005, both S & S) offer another book to ponder and pore over. Readers are again encouraged to stretch their imaginations and question perspective and perception. Painterly acrylic panoramas, supported by lyrical text, are packed with skewed realities. On the title page, an image of a cathedral's interior transmutes into a city skyline as the pointed arches become silhouetted skyscrapers and the mottled stonework of ancient walls, buttressed ceilings, and floor become the rippled surface of the surrounding harbor and stratocumulus clouds. On another spread, the text reads, "Imagine a place./where water is solid,/light is liquid,/sky a frozen river/flowing under your feet," and the illustration shows skaters gliding across a nighttime river, their lanterns reflecting the moonlight, and snow banks that mirror the clouds above. The sometimes esoteric text and sophisticated art play with literality: houseboats are depicted as brick-and-stone manors in giant skiffs, their verdant lawns enclosed by bow-and-stern-curved fences. This is not magical realism, but shifting realism-magical, to be sure, but not in the high-falutin', metaphysical sense. This is the magic of positive and negative space, of expectation and experimentation, of creativity and conversion. Readers will want to look, look again, discuss, and imagine.-Kathy Krasniewicz, Perrot Library, Old Greenwich, CT (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 Kirkus Book Review

Having invited young dreamers to Imagine a Night (2003) and Imagine a Day (2005), Thomson poetically guides further travel into a new set of surreal, elaborately detailed interiors and landscapes created by Gonsalves. In M.C. Escherlike transformations and tricks of perspective, stars in a night sky become fireflies or lanterns, a ski slope spreads out to become an orchard of flowering trees, sea waves change seamlessly into mountains, windblown drapes into a dancing couple and gothic arches into skyscrapers. The captions add to the general air of mystery: "Imagine a place / where music sings / in every breeze / of a summer night, / and the wind twirls you / in a waltz / that lasts until dawn." As in the previous gatherings, there's no consistent theme and any narrative structure is vestigial at best. Still, each picture will bring new wonders to armchair sightseers. (Picture book. 7-9) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.