The Magical Fantastical Fridge

November 2, 2015
A boy named Walden, bored stiff at the prospect of another weekly dinner with his extended family, is magically dragged into one of his own drawings displayed on the family refrigerator, kicking off an adventure through two-dimensional, magnet-held domestic paraphernalia. He swims through a pair of Coney Island aquarium tickets, gets zapped as he passes through the family electric bill, and escapes back to reality with help from a pair of scissors in a hair salon coupon. Adult author Coben’s first picture book starts like an update on Through the Looking Glass, but quickly sinks into narrative and visual incoherence, further marred by literal narration and wordplay that sounds like a grownup trying hard to be funny. (“This is shocking!” says Walden while in the electric bill, “But ‘current’-ly I love this.”) Debut illustrator Tinari has an intensely expressionistic, caricatured style that seems far better suited to one-off comic portraits than sustained action. By the time Walden transforms into a talking fried chicken leg, readers may be ready to set this one aside. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.

December 15, 2015
When his mother instructs him to set the table for an extended family dinner, Walden rebels; he'd rather have an adventure than deal with boring relatives. Walden gets his wish when one of his crayon drawings sucks him into the art on the fridge. Hopping from one bit of refrigerator detritus to the next, he moves through coupons, photographs, ads, and more, eventually escaping with a better appreciation for home. The narrative is composed primarily of Walden's expository exclamations as he moves from ticket stub to birthday invitation and beyond. The intention here appears to be to inspire kids to use what's stuck on their own home fridges to create their own adventures. Yet Walden's travels are so arbitrary and without plot that when at last he escapes the fridge, the statement that home with family is "the best PLACE in the WHOLE WORLD" is unearned. Debut artist Tinari, whose art Coben discovered on the wall of one of his favorite restaurants, brings to the book a wild sensibility; she's unafraid to toy with panels, styles, and narrative jump-cuts, and the text is hand-lettered, with frequent and distracting changes in style. Readers may occasionally have difficulty connecting to her figures, since they do not always resemble one another from one page to the next. He may be a master of suspense, but the only mystery surrounding Coben's first foray into picture books may be why he wrote such a convoluted hodgepodge. (Picture book. 4-7)

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January 1, 2016
Grades K-2 Having conquered adult and YA best-seller lists, Coben dashes after the youngest crowd with a picture book so bizarreindeed, almost incomprehensiblethat it's actually sort of impressive. You can almosthear Coben's lightbulb go off: What if a bored kid imagined that he got sucked onto the refrigerator door and had to navigate all the family ephemera posted there? That'd be wild, right? Well, yes. Walden is yanked into his own drawing of a dragon, fights it off with a pizza magnet, takes an illustrated airplane into a black-and-white photo of his grandparents, falls into the water of a Coney Island ticket stub, transports via library card into the actual library (huh?), where he becomes a chicken drumstick (what?) who has to cut himself out of his sister's hair (come again?). Slathered in Tinari's ever-mutating hand-lettering and crammed with Coben's cavalcade of punny groaners, the action, while relentless, is also relentlessly difficult to follow. But there's hope: endpapers provide a map of the whole fridge. Pretty freaking weird, but the right kid will dig it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It's Cobenhis name sells, and the concept alone should get this picked up quite a bit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)