This book got lost on my shelf a long time ago and I’ve finally found it again. It’s the story of a girl whose teddy bear gets swept out the window from the wind. She goes on an adventure flying on a song sparrow’s back to try and retrieve it. They eventually come to a cave of real bears she has to befriend and play dress up with. In the end this may have all just been a dream. This book is mostly long horizontal landscape pictures and very little written story. The drawings are quite stylistically interesting. The girl’s head, hands and feet are really enormous and not proportional. Everything seems very sculpted but then the heavy outlines on everything make it become more graphic. It turns out the illustrator, Thomas Aquinas Maguire is actually primarily an industrial designer and this was his first book( he is coming out with more soon!). It made me wonder if some of the 3-d modeling he must have to constantly work on influenced his style. I can easily see these characters come to life as vinyl toys- maybe a next step! You can get a copy of this book here.

© Julia Rothman 2007