Two quarrelsome preteen sibs are exiled to a dusty attic full of books and find one (cleverly titled "The Bored Book") that unfolds massively to cast the pair into quick encounters with a troll, pirates, a squad of knights in armor and a dragon. Having made their escape, the lad and lass discover that each scene came from a certain literary classic and so proceed to settle down happily to read one such (unidentified) together. Keith's illustrations do little to turn Slater's narrative into a fully realized literary adventure. The dimly penciled "real" world gives way to muddy color when the found volume unfolds like a giant map, both children are as crudely drawn as the generic places through which they tumble and the jumbled plotline dissolves into complete incoherence at the end. Michael Garland's Miss Smith's Incredible Storybook (2003) and Barbara Lehman's Red Book (2004) are but two of several better uses of the book-as-gateway trope. (Picture book. 6-8)

Gr 1-4 It's difficult to determine the audience for this wordless picture book, which is a watered-down version of Todd Strasser's The Pagemaster (Scholastic, 1994). Opening black-and-white sketches show a brother and sister fighting while a grandfatherly man is trying to read in a room lined with bookshelves. Tired of their squabbling, he pulls aside a bookcase to reveal a hidden staircase. Climbing it, the children find themselves in an attic full of cobweb-covered tomes and pick up The Bored Book . As they open it, color floods from the pages, lighting up their astonished faces. The pages fold out to a huge mural that takes up the entire room and depicts many unrelated scenes. The siblings get sucked into one picture and find themselves on an icy slope facing what may be the Abominable Snowman, and in another, they confront pirates. After many adventures, they return to the old man in the dusty attic (now drawn in full color) and show him the mysterious volume. He calmly shows them shelves of titles such as Treasure Island and Sinbad . The children choose a book and are seen happily reading from it together. Keith's illustrations are too frightening for young audiences, but children who are old enough to read Treasure Island will not be engaged by a series of drawings about terrified kids running away from what the book flap calls "the adventure of a lifetime." Martha Simpson, Stratford Library Association, CT