Museum Trip

Starred review from June 26, 2006
On the heels of her Caldecott Honor title The Red Book
, Lehman offers an equally evocative wordless sequence. A boy in a tomato-red sweatshirt, whose dot mouth and dot eyes make him look both tranquil and perpetually surprised, arrives with his class at a museum full of modern art. When he stops to tie his shoe, he stumbles upon a room with a case displaying a half-dozen old drawings of labyrinths (a statue of a slumbering Minotaur sits in the corner). Just as suddenly, he finds himself shrunk down and standing on the faded parchment of the first maze. Lehman uses warm sepia ink for the walls of the mazes, now shoulder-high to the boy, and hatching lines to give the walls dimension; the boy makes a bright contrast as he works his way through all six. With exquisite pacing, Lehman depicts a series of panels in which the boy enters the tower in the center of the final maze. Through a keyhole, readers spy someone inside hanging a gold medal around the boy's neck as a reward for his achievement. Then the boy returns to normal and rejoins the tour. Was the journey in the boy's imagination? The very last panel suggests it was not. Young readers will find endless satisfaction in traveling through the mazes with the boy, and art lovers will enjoy identifying some famous artwork. Ages 4-8.

May 1, 2006
K-Gr 4 -In this wordless follow-up to "The Red Book" (Houghton, 2004), in which the characters enter the pages of a book, a boy enters a work of art. During a school visit to a museum, he stops to tie his shoe and loses his group. While searching for it, he comes across a display case filled with old mazes that capture his attention. On one spread, he is looking closely at a particular drawing, and the page turn shows him physically inside of it. He enters several different labyrinths; at the center of the last one, he finds a tower with a door and goes inside. Readers view him through a keyhole and see him receiving a medal. Afterward, he locates his classmates, but as they depart, youngsters will note that he still has his medal. The museum director also wears one: they are clearly both part of a special group. The bright, clean cartoons are done in watercolor, gouache, and ink. Single- and double-page paintings alternate with smaller panel illustrations. Close-ups of the protagonist walking through each maze are mixed with pulled-back shots that reveal the entire puzzle, with the boy a small figure inside of it. Children will pore over the cleverly detailed, interactive artwork." -Julie Roach, Cambridge Public Library, MA"

Copyright 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2006
PreS-Gr. 2. Working in the same uncluttered style and wordless format as she did in " The Red Book," a 2005 Caldecott Honor Book, Lehman offers another winning picture book that blurs real and imagined worlds. On a class trip to an art museum, a boy lags behind and becomes lost. While searching the galleries (filled with Lehman's skillful reproductions of the masters), he finds a series of labyrinth drawings, and in the following frames, he shrinks to a diminutive size and enters the mazes. Lehman uses inventive, shifting perspectives that combine aerial views with close-ups of the boy in the puzzles. At the completion of the final maze, a set of hands loops a medal around the boy's neck. The boy then pops back into the real world, but he finds the medal tucked into his shirt--a tantalizing suggestion that the adventure wasn't imagined. The sturdiness and clarity of the ink-lined, watercolor-and-gouache art juxtaposes wonderfully with the story's airy world of imagination. Some children may find the labyrinth scenes a bit repetitive, but Lehman's clever celebration of the fun and power found in art and daydreamed departures will easily draw an audience. For other fanciful museum stories suggest Anthony Browne's " The Shape Game" (2003).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)