FICTION

The Plan

by Alison PAUL
illus. by Barbara Lehman. 32p. HMH. Nov. 2015. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9780544283336.
COPY ISBN
PreS-Gr 2—Using only 10 letters to make 20 words, Paul provides the scaffold on which Lehman builds a story. Paul's word ladder, in which letters are added or subtracted from one page to the next: "pals/ Pa's/past/post" are fun, but it's Lehman's watercolors that form a narrative. Her firmly lined pen-and-ink drawings are easily interpreted as they depict a little girl who longs to fly the abandoned bi-plane sitting on her family farm and the way she persuades her widowed father to take to the air again. Readers may feel left hanging by the unexplained backstory. Viewers see father and daughter visiting her mother's grave, but have no idea how she perished.
VERDICT It's all a bit sketchy.—Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Library, NY
Reviewed by perhaps not to Saturn, but they do have a lot of luggage. This narrative is given the added dimension of a word morph game, where each word leads to the next with the addition or deletion of one letter, plan to plane to planet, eventually coming full circle back to plan. The deeper story lies in the spaces between the words, especially in the five wordless pictures that lead from pain to plain. Did May's mother die in an airplane accident? Childbirth? Is the family leaving home for good? The emotions are clear; the story itself leaves us room to speculate. Sarah Ellis
, Jun 01, 2015

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