In this irresistible pen-and-ink exploration of imagination, the drawings are specific enough to ground readers in Christopher Myers's reality and ambiguous enough for them to bring their own experiences to the scenes.
Myers plays with the relationship between artist and instrument. An unbroken ink line cuts the white title page on a diagonal while simultaneously bringing to life the child narrator. The boy looks downcast at the thought of "rich people who own jewels and houses and pieces of the sky.... But then I remember I have my pen." He shows readers all the things his pen can do. "My pen makes giants of old men who have seen better days," acts as caption to a portrait of the author-artist's father, Walter Dean Myers. Sometimes, artist and pen are interchangeable: "My pen rides dinosaurs and hides an elephant in a teacup" pictures the artist on the back of a T. Rex, then observing an elephant whose trunk echoes the teacup's handle. Myers varies the pace with single pages (a standout renders an X-ray of the artist's rib cage as the wings of a Monarch butterfly) and full-spread scenes that juxtapose images of war with a light-filled spread of diverse children and a giant heart antidote.
A metadrawing of the pen creating a self-portrait, as the artist stares into a mirror, begs the question: Does the artist make the art, or does the art make the artist? He ends with an invitation to readers to dive in and find out. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness