Starred Review Charged with fetching his baby sister's sock from the laundry, Milo is forced into a showdown with the foreboding basement of his new house. Thanks to a slippery sock rat, though, he's drawn downward, and as room after impossible room becomes castle, cavern, and underground lake, this ever-deepening mystery shifts into an epic, mythic adventure as he travels on. On this grand premise, Hatke hangs a tale of remarkable visual bounty. Indeed, there are few out there producing works that give you more to look at, or perhaps more to take from what you see. The story is well aware of this: one of Milo's stalwarts on this trip actually speaks in pictures, and the other is literally an eyeball. The creatures are merely the tip of the visual iceberg, though; the precision of movement and action keeps even the extended silent passages riveting, and the extraordinary control of shadow and color gives each location its own unique tone, saturated with a sense of emotion and eerie history. Generous in structure, as well, just when the tale could come to a satisfying conclusion, it opens wider, its most heart-pounding moments still ahead. Hatke creates a catchy internal mythology for this subterranean world, too, and offers heroic examples of perseverance, commitment, friendship, and teamwork.

A boy's search for a sock leads him below and beyond the world he knows.Milo feels adrift-twin babies take up his mother's attention, and their new home is full of moving boxes and devoid of fun. When Milo's mom asks him to locate one of the babies' socks in the cavernous basement, he reluctantly agrees. He heads down into a classically creepy old-house basement and spies a rat absconding with the bright pink sock. Milo gives chase through multiple curiously adorned subbasements, careens down a dark tunnel in a mine cart, and finally falls into a boundless underworld full of artifacts of bygone civilizations-and a gargantuan mountain of socks. As he descends, Milo befriends a chattering skull, a giant eyeball, a ghost girl seeking her stocking, and a nun with a bell for a face. Together, they face the sock rats and a translucent monster who threatens to thwart them. Hatke's artistic vision is central to the story, with constantly flowing, kinetic linework that sweeps readers along, riptidelike, ever deeper into the story. The shadowy underworld feels imposing without descending into horror; it helps that the big bad guy is a green ball of goo. With a light touch to the dialogue, this work explores themes of loss, grief, and displacement in moving ways. Milo and his family are cued Latine.A journey of loss both intimate and fantastical, swept along by flowing, emotive illustrations. (Graphic fantasy. 7-12)