Horn Book (Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2003)

Minnie is thrilled when she overhears her friend Charles talking about a party at his house. But she becomes increasingly miserable each day that an invitation does not arrive. On Saturday, Minnie unexpectedly finds herself enjoying Charles's company--after he escapes from what turns out to be his sister's party. Although both text and watercolor illustrations are playful, they deftly capture the pain of feeling left out.

Kirkus Reviews

With a set of moonlit, dreamily mysterious scenes, each of which features an M.C. Escherlike transformation, Gonsalves invites viewers to drift past reality's familiar borders. Thompson's captions reflect what's happening in each surrealistic painting: "Imagine a night when the space between words becomes like the space between trees. . . ," for instance, accompanies a scene in which floorboards change to shadowy forest behind an adult reading to children. On other spreads church windows, sunflowers, and reflections on water turn into human-like figures, a quilt becomes a patchwork landscape, and a toy train turns big. Beguiling fare for fans of the likes of Chris Van Allsburg's Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), Steve Johnson's As the City Sleeps (2002), or Quint Buchholz's subtler Collector of Moments (1999). (Picture book. 6-12)

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

Not quite a narrative and not quite a catalogue, this volume presents a series of hallucinatory paintings, loosely unified by atmospheric lyrics. Gonsalves specializes in optical illusions. In his Escher-like cover image, a moonlit row of pine trees reflects in a dark lake; on close observation, viewers see the mirrored space between the trees transforming into a ghostly procession of women in white gowns, illumined by sepulchral lamplight ("Imagine a night.../ ...when moonlight spills/ across the water/ to make a path/ for the lightest feet"). In two candlelit images, narrow cathedral windows metamorphose into tall men in monks' robes. An artist cuts his curtains into the silhouette of a city skyline, so that the distinction between the cloth and the horizon becomes unclear. Children glide over brown and green patchwork quilts, which turn to farmland, or cheerfully aim their wagons and bikes down a scary, roller-coaster–steep street. Thomson (<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Stars and Stripes,reviewed May 26) has the task of retrofitting prose to the finished images, which are related conceptually but—like the pictures in Guy Billout's recent <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Something's Not Quite Right—do not form a story. Each of Thomson's passages begins with the title words, and implies more pleasant dreams than the artist's playful but edgy images suggest: "Imagine a night... /...when candlelight rises/ on butterfly wings/ to greet the lonely stars." A concluding gallery of the plates emphasizes the artificiality of the secondhand narration, but Gonsalves's work nevertheless casts a spooky spell. All ages. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(June)

School Library Journal (Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 2003)

Gr 4 Up-Magical realism permeates Gonsalves's large acrylic paintings, and they are essential to the lyrical text. For "imagine a night/whenyou can hear/a farmer play his fields to sleep," the artist depicts a man playing a fiddle on a porch in front of a field of sunflowersbut no, the flowers have human faces, leafy bodies, and green-gloved hands, and they are bowing their heads in sleep. A painting of children riding their bikes up a flight of stairs accompanies "imagine a night/when you might find/that gravity/doesn't work/quite as you expected." A girl walking in a church cloister suddenly looks over her shoulder and discovers that she's not alone, as the pointed church windows become hooded monks forming a procession. In the back of the book, each painting is repeated in miniature with its actual name. This is a fascinating foray into the imagination and a fine discussion starter for older children. For another look at things that are not what they seem, pair it with Guy Billout's Something's Not Quite Right (Godine, 2002). Marianne Saccardi, Norwalk Community College, CT