Dreams

The Great Good Thing

“Rawwwwk! Reader!” screams an orange bird. “Booook open!” groans a frog. Then the sky lifts away and the enormous face of a child peers down into Sylvie’s storybook world. At last, a reader again! Sylvie has been a twelve-year-old princess for more than eighty years, ever since the book she lives in was first printed. She’s the heroine, and her story is exciting — but it’s always exciting in the same way. That’s the trouble. Sylvie has a restless urge to explore, to accomplish a Great Good Thing beyond the margins of her book. This time, when the new face appears, Sylvie breaks the rule of all storybook characters: Never look at the Reader. Worse, she gets to know the reader, a shy young girl named Claire, and when Claire falls asleep with the book open, Sylvie enters her dreams. After a fire threatens her kingdom, Sylvie rescues the other characters, taking them across the sea in an invisible fish that rolls up like a window shade when it’s out of water. For years they all live, royalty and rogues, in Claire’s subconscious — a surprising and sometimes perilous place. In this new land, Sylvie achieves many Good Things, but the Greatest, like this dazzling book, goes far and deep, beyond even her imaginings.

My Very Own Room/Mi Propio Cuartito

With the help of her family, a resourceful Mexican-American girl with two parents, five little brothers, and visiting relatives realizes her dream of having a space of her own to read and to think. Based on the author’s own childhood.

A Fish Named Glub

In a rundown diner, in an unnamed city, an ordinary fish asks itself the big questions in life. Glub finds the answers he’s looking for by listening to the lively characters of the greasy spoon beyond his fishbowl. And it’s through Glub that they, the lonely Foster included, uncover the answers to questions they had long forgotten.

Excuse Me, Is This India?

Illustrated with rich quilts put together with Indian textiles, this whimsical story in verse is an unusual book of travel-through a child’s imagination. Brilliant nonsense verse and exquisite textile art together plot a blithe, philosophic journey through the surreal mixture of places, people and times that is India.

Only Ever Always

The notes of an old music box connects two girls from very different worlds–Clara, who struggles to survive poverty and violence in a troubled city, and Claire, whose ordinary life is beset by grief–in a place where neither can be sure what is real.

The Herd Boy

While doing a good job of caring for his grandfather’s sheep and goat on the grasslands of South Africa, young Malusi dreams of everything from owning his own dog to becoming president one day.

Featured in Volume VI, Issue 1 of WOW Review.