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.

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