The Trek - Hardcover

PreSchool-Grade 3 An imaginative child's walk to school through a placid neighborhood, park and shopping area becomes, instead, a trek through a jungle inhabited by wild animals at every step. (Two charts at the end of the book identify hidden animals and give an added dimension, but they also cause the "real world" to encroach on the story's final moment a bit too abruptly.) Jonas' artful watercolor transformations of familiar objects create camouflage creatures everywhere, immediately engaging children in this game of discovery. "My mother doesn't walk me to school anymore," the story begins, as Jonas presents, with clarity of form, a daughter kissing her mother goodbye at her front door. Immediately children will get the physical sense of standing on a threshold, adventure beckoning. Reality melds into dream as The Trek offers an alternative world, ripe with creative possibilities. Taking its colors from nature, The Trek exudes light and warmth. Each picture invites the eye to enter into a jungle world whose boundaries are defined and controlled by the little girl. Best about this book is that as Jonas changes stone chimneys into giraffes, garbage bags into rhinos, creeping ivy into creeping lizards, she inspires children to keep looking beyond her pages, showing what visual metamorphoses are possible to those with fresh, seeking eyes. Susan Powers, Berkeley Carroll St. School, Brooklyn
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