Starred Review ALA Booklist (Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2009)

Starred Review Originally published in France in 2007, this stunning travelogue leads readers through a journey from Bangladesh to Scotland to Antarctica and beyond. Each oversize page is grounded by a poetic fragment evoking each locale: "In the ocean, the whale splashes white foam and blue foam. urey Island, Iceland." A faint ecological bent further enriches the descriptions. But the main event is the alternately dizzying and mysterious black-and-white woodcut illustrations. They can be flipped through like an ordinary book, though the full impact is felt only through unfurling all 15 pages so that they lay flat in a seamless panorama that stretches from mountains to highlands to ocean to village. Still the fun is not over. "Night falls 's time to go home. In the dark, what is different?" reads the final text, prompting the reader to flip over the giant landscape to discover a notably different nighttime version of the entire vista, where playing children now sleep and prowling tigers are replaced with lurking alligators. The twisting and turning required would test the construction of any book, but the heavy-duty pages should stand up to moderate torture. To be safe, buy two. It's worth it.

Horn Book (Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2009)

In this panoramic book, readers can open folds to make one long scene or turn them like pages to learn about world habitats. Do these environs change at night? Read from the back, the journey reverses itself. Illustrations resembling block prints (black figures on white backgrounds or white on black) showcase flora and fauna. An outstanding blend of form and content.

Kirkus Reviews

A sparely beautiful tour of the world. A line of text along the bottom edge of each accordion-fold page places young readers precisely: "In the great desert, look how the sun is so white, the shadows so black. Feel how the sand burns so hot." The muscular black-and-white line traces the dunes, a camel train, a scorpion. "Adrar Desert, Sahara, Mauritania," says the tag line. Each page blends into the next, moving readers around the world, past Highland cattle grazing by Loch Ness in Scotland; the Turkish coast, where scents are almost visible in the stark black-and-white air; a field of butterflies in Romania; snow falling over the Dolomites in Italy. Then the folds reverse, and readers view those scenes at night, without text: The Galapagos tortoise sleeps in its shell; a wolf howls by an Alaskan waterfall.The dramatic visuals are both easy to comprehend and repay close attention, as details emerge and the exotic locales become familiar. Watch for children stretching out the whole across a floor, and eagerly turning it over to see the dreams in the world at night. (Picture book. 5-10)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Jolivet's (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">365 Penguins) b&w illustrations, evocative of block prints, create a montage of world ecosystems in this oversize accordion-style book. In Akurey Island, Iceland, a whale splashes, emerging next to a sleepy Turkish village where “the air smells of thyme and sage.” On subsequent pages, the Hong Kong cityscape transitions into a Romanian meadow, which morphs into the Senegalese savanna. After the final page, the journey begins again, with images of each region at night on the reverse side. Capable of being read like a traditional picture book or unfolded into an enormous chain of images, the book radiates a subtle message of global interconnectedness. Ages 4–up.<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC""> (Apr.)