Twenty Questions

K-Gr 2--Reminiscent of Chris Van Allsburg's Mysteries of Harris Burdick, but without the eeriness, Barnett captions a set of Robinson's flattened, brightly hued, paper-collage style cartoon scenes with open-ended questions for inventive storysmiths: "How many animals can you not see in this [picture] because they're hiding from the tiger?" "What is this boy" (who is standing between an ostrich and a tortoise in a wheelchair) "hiding behind his back?" "What kind of beast lives in this bathtub? And what does it eat?" The illustrator gets into the act by challenging viewers to concoct plotlines from random common items set in wordless arrays on the endpapers and, in a surreal transformation that just gets stranger the more it's looked at, turning one of a pair of lion paws in a scene into a full lion by adding a few inked lines and a tail. And perhaps with an eye to the Oh, the Places You'll Go! market, at the end a ship heads for the horizon. "Will you go with it? Are you ever coming back?" VERDICT An inspiring set of story prompts for younger audiences, with some longer thoughts for older ones slipped in.--John Edward Peters

Barnett and Robinson (Leo: A Ghost Story) reteam for this interactive picture book, which asks questions that spur contemplation and wonder. Alongside an initial question--"How many animals can you see in this picture?"--the first pages show a green tree dotted with various creatures, including a peacock, a panther, and a snake. A page later, a lone orange tiger creeps through dense undergrowth. "How many animals can you not see in this one," sly text reads, "because they're hiding from the tiger?" Across a string of expansive queries, the images' quiet understatement provides a dry counterpoint to the questions' whimsy. Attending one spread that shows six people with different skin tones and styles, and a police officer driving by them, Barnett asks, "Which of these ladies just robbed a bank?" Some pages invite speculation (about a cow perched on a wind turbine: "How did that cow get all the way up there?"), others tease (regarding a bathtub in which two eyes are just visible: "What kind of beast lives in this bathtub?"), and some encourage storytelling (relating to a figure and seagulls pictured alongside an outcropping, "Who is she waiting for?"). All of them set readers free to notice and invent. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)