One night, as a girl sleeps in her bed, the red-collared cat on her blanket spies a red toy mouse on the floor. Through a portal in the wall arrives a blue-collared cat, which makes off with the mouse back through the hatch. The red-collared cat follows the other cat through the portal. The girl, who has awoken and taken all this in, can't be expected to stay put, can she?
That's when things get weird--for the reader. (The girl and cat remain unruffled throughout their adventure.) After the girl follows her cat through the portal, she appears with her head sticking out of a hole in what looks like the floor, yet her braids point skyward. Turning the page and rotating the book 180 degrees solves the gravity-defying hair problem: now her head is poking out from a hole in the ceiling. From this vantage point, she observes her cat entering a portal in the wall. After she shinnies down some red fabric (it looks an awful lot like the blanket on her bed), she trails her cat through the portal. A turn of the page shows the girl emerging from the hole; readers can help her out by rotating the book 90 degrees to position her upright.
Girl and cat proceed through this surreal obstacle course, which includes a ball pit slide, a rainbow-colored conveyor belt and a free-floating play space where children of a range of ethnic backgrounds draw, Hula-Hoop and so on. Finally, the adventurers are confronted by their ceiling-walking doppelgängers: the blue-collared cat and someone who looks exactly like the girl but for a blue emblem on her nightgown. She tosses the red toy mouse to the girl; they wave goodbye, and the girl and her red-collared cat enter the portal leading back to her bedroom.
With its loop-the-loop perspective and call for interactivity, Another will remind readers of Press Here, and the girl's unblinking entrée into another dimension, perhaps of her own improvisation, calls to mind Harold and the Purple Crayon. But this isn't to attribute anything other than full creative authorship to Christian Robinson, whose illustrator credits include the justly ballyhooed Last Stop on Market Street. Robinson makes this wholly original wordless fantasy utterly coherent thanks to clutter-free, digitally tweaked paint-and-collage art that pointedly doesn't hide its real-world seams (brushstrokes, crumpled paper). Most readers will gladly surrender to this mind-bending romp, which may not be over for the protagonists at book's end: on the last page, the cat, back on the again-sleeping girl's bed, lifts the edge of the blanket to reveal a blue toy mouse on the floor. Here they go again? --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author
Shelf Talker: In this exhilarating wordless picture book, a girl and her cat enter a portal to a physically skewed world where they encounter, among other things, their doppelgängers.