What to Do with a Box

March 1, 2016

PreS-Gr 1-Nothing sparks a child's imagination quite like a cardboard box. This book enumerates a variety of possibilities for this deceptively mundane container. When a boy, a girl, and a dog explore the uses of a large box, Yolen suggests it can become a library, a palace, a canvas, a boat, a car, or a plane. Sheban's acrylic, pencil, and watercolor illustrations are painted directly onto cardboard, its beige color and texture peeking throughout the softly glowing spreads depicting the box's many incarnations. Despite the rhyming text mentioning various fantastic prospects, the box itself remains unchanged, even as it's employed to tow an overturned Eiffel tower or fly through the air. VERDICT Though not as imaginative or charming as Antoinette Portis's Not a Box (HarperCollins, 2006), this is a sweet story that could be welcome in collections where books about imagination are in demand.-Yelena Alekseyeva-Popova, formerly at Chappaqua Library, NY

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2016
An ode to cardboard, four sides, and flaps both honors and alerts children to the pleasures it houses. Jolly rhymes sing praise, perhaps prompting readers to look near their recycling bins for a fresh box. What else can be "a library, / palace, / or nook"? Add some dolls, and you've got a tea party. Paint a backdrop, and you're basking at the beach or sitting by a forest stream. Put simply, "A box! A box / is a wonder / indeed. / The only / such magic / that you'll / ever need." The succinct, straightforward simplicity of Yolen's singsong-y verse suits its subject: the everyday, plain-old, big-brown box. Sheban's inviting artwork, painted and drawn atop real corrugated and flat cardboard, makes clear the magic that happens when introducing imagination to an ordinary packing box. Warmth, depth, expanse, and humor all reside in his paintings, which show a red-haired white boy and dark-haired, slightly darker-skinned girl playing inside a box, their own illustrations and creativity at work. Sheban imbues the cardboard-box brown that covers and constitutes so much of these pictures with a honeyed amber that almost glows, especially alongside strokes of white acrylic paint that highlight each spread. Intuitive, inspired executions of art and verse perfectly capture the unending fun of time spent inside a box. (Picture book. 3-8)

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Starred review from February 15, 2016
Preschool-G *Starred Review* Beginning with Sheban's trompe l'oeil cover illustration, Yolen's latest picture book charmingly captures both real life and imaginary adventures. Starring a bespectacled girl, a red-haired boy, and, at center stage, a big cardboard box, the book is written in spare but appealing rhymes, and illustrated with great skill and cleverness. Using watercolor, colored pencil, and white acrylic paint, Sheban created all of the pictures on actual cardboard, effectively immersing young readers into the experience. Yolen's text suggests a variety of ways that kids can use such a container: it can be a place to read books, to play with a friend, and to make art ( You can paint a landscape with sun, sand and sky / or crayon an egret that's flying right by ). It can also be a vehicle for make-believe ( You can drive in that box all around a dirt track. / You can sail in that box off to Paris and back ). Tagging along on these escapades is a watchful but sweet-looking dog, and Sheban's use of unusual perspectives makes the interactions between the kids, the box, and the dog entertaining to examine. The book's final page, featuring the familiar words this end up turned into the end, is another nice touch of thinking outside the box.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2016
Yolen's minimal rhyming verse muses on the imaginative potential of cardboard boxes: "You can climb inside and there read a book. It can be a library, / palace, / or nook." Sheban's soft and dreamy illustrations, created with different paints and colored pencils on brown cardboard packages, bring to life the poetic text.

(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)