FICTION

What to Do with a Box

by Jane YOLEN
illus. by Chris Sheban. 32p. Creative Editions. Mar. 2016. Tr $17.99. ISBN 9781568462899.
COPY ISBN
PreS-Gr 1—Nothing sparks a child's imagination quite like a cardboard box. This book enumerates a variety of possibilities for this deceptively mundane container. When a boy, a girl, and a dog explore the uses of a large box, Yolen suggests it can become a library, a palace, a canvas, a boat, a car, or a plane. Sheban's acrylic, pencil, and watercolor illustrations are painted directly onto cardboard, its beige color and texture peeking throughout the softly glowing spreads depicting the box's many incarnations. Despite the rhyming text mentioning various fantastic prospects, the box itself remains unchanged, even as it's employed to tow an overturned Eiffel tower or fly through the air.
VERDICT Though not as imaginative or charming as Antoinette Portis's Not a Box (HarperCollins, 2006), this is a sweet story that could be welcome in collections where books about imagination are in demand.
Reviewed by Yelena Alekseyeva-Popova, formerly at Chappaqua Library, NY
Yolen's minimal rhyming verse muses on the imaginative potential of cardboard boxes: "You can climb inside and there read a book. It can be a library, / palace, / or nook." Sheban's soft and dreamy illustrations, created with different paints and colored pencils on brown cardboard packages, bring to life the poetic text.
 , Mar 01, 2016

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