A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston is a treasure box for book lovers. You can open it again and again, over years and decades, and be reminded instantly of the power of words and stories, the joy to be found in words and stories, the comfort of and the magic of words and stories. A Child of Books is for explorers, cautious armchair explorers who read before they venture out and bold adventurers who head into the world and report back.
Starting with the dedication page, A Child of Books sent me out into the world. "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms," a line from Muriel Rukeyser's poem, "The Speed of Darkness," sets the tone perfectly for this picture book. Then, together, Jeffers and Winston dedicate their book to Hubrinek, following with this quote from Primo Levi's 1947 work, If This is a Man / The Truce, "Hubrinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine." This quote reminded me of the power of words to keep something that has passed present, but it also made me want to know more about Hubrinek and so I searched him out.
A collaboration between Jeffers and Winston is a perfect match. I have been reading and reviewing Jeffers's books for years and his love of words and stories, starting with The Incredible Book Eating Boy in 2007, is obvious. Sam Winston, a fine artist who, in Jeffers's words makes "imaginatively crafted limited edition art books," creates typographic landscapes that shine in this picture book format. Using public domain books, the endpapers for A Child of Books are a table of contents (with some extra bits worth searching out) for what can be found making up in the landscapes inside. Text from Treasure Island, Peter Pan and Wendy, Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein and lullabies are used to creates mountains, oceans, waves, monsters, caves and trees.
And the story itself? A meditation on imagination that follows a girl who tells readers, "I am a child of books. I come from a world of stories and upon my imagination I float." Sailing across a sea of words, she reaches a house - your house, my house - where she asks, "if you will come away with me?" A page turn is all it takes to travel over "mountains of make-believe" and through "forests of fairy tales."
A Child of Books ends with these marvelous words, "For this is our world, we're made from stories . . . Our house is a home of invention where anyone at all can come, for imagination is free."
A Child of Books is a book that you will want for yourself and to give as a gift. Stock up now, the winter holidays are just around the corner!
Source: Review Copy
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