Another
by Christian Robinson; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary    Atheneum    56 pp.
3/19    978-1-5344-2167-7    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-1-5344-2168-4    $10.99

For his solo picture book debut, Robinson (illustrator of Last Stop on Market Street, rev. 3/15; School’s First Day of School, rev. 3/16; When’s My Birthday?, rev. 9/17; and more) offers a smart, sly, and imaginative wordless story about a girl and her cat embarking on a fantastical adventure. The girl is asleep in bed (on the right-hand page) when her wakeful, red-collared cat notices a white, ovular space shining from the verso. Turn the page, and there’s another cat (this one in a blue collar) peeking out from that oval. The red-collared cat pursues the blue-collared one into the white space, and the girl wakes. She follows them and ends up in another dimension. At first, she appears to be sprouting from the ground through a black hole against the spread’s white expanse; but her beaded braids stand up on end, defying gravity — and providing a signal to readers to flip the book over. She follows her cat through another portal (and another and another), each time prompting reorientation of the book; after encountering her own double, she and her cat finally make it back home. A subtle visual punch line at book’s end, when girl and cat have returned to bed, will reward careful viewers with a laugh and a prompt to go back through the book to reassess characters’ roles and motives.

From the March/April 2019 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.