The Red Thread

A little boy follows a red thread and discovers strange and exotic worlds, including a forest full of trolls, a magical garden, a circus, and the elaborate funeral of a honey bee. Interwoven with the drawings are characters from famous works of art and literature.A little boy follows a red thread and discovers strange and exotic worlds, including a forest full of trolls, a magical garden, a circus, and the elaborate funeral of a honey bee

Kindergarten-Grade 4 The influence of Anno's Journey (Philomel, 1981) is too strong to ignore even though the style of this textless journey through a surreal world is radically different. The red thread begins (and ends) on the book's cover, where a clownish gentleman holds it out to a quartet of redheaded youngsters. It then goes onto the endpapers when a boy runs off a merry-go-round with it. And so on until one closes the book to find the thread on the back cover on the way to the front again. In between are characters from paintings and books (Mona Lisa, Rousseau, Picasso, Durer, etc.) mixed in with more ordinary folk involved with the assorted bunch of activities involving fanciful forests, stimulating skyscrapers, and even a delightfully dramatic drawing board. Part of the fun will be in identifying who's who and what's where. And there's no way of discovering everything in a single looking. Beyond the overt identifications there is the intriguing draw of the symbols appearing in strange and wonderful places, the challenge to create meanings, even a narrative, from the enticing raw visual materials. Kenneth Marantz, Art Education Department, Ohio State University, Columbus
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The red thread appears endless as it winds through the wordless pages of this original, color-drenched book, but onlookers (of any age and temperament) will find themselves in a loop that they may jump in and out of at will, for every spread is a little world with its own rules, logic and dimensions. In Nygren's odd tour, an owl perches on a pencil that lays across an artist's pad; from wells of the imagination spring a collage of artists, musicians, children's book characters, beekeepers and forest nymphs; and in the corner of a page a rabbit nibbles at the moon. The path of the red thread is linear in concept but not always straight as an arrow: a man must ride on the back of a snail, on a bee and even hitchhike with a grasshopper to get to his own true love. As the thread wends its way through the pages, it inspires readers to flip back or forward, looking for ties that bind. Near the end, Winnie, Puss in Boots and Babar, among many other beloved characters, come spilling out of the bookshelf toward a child reading in bed. Nygren beckons one and all to follow (or not) his thread, and the discoveries within these pages will please and challenge both sophisticated and homespun tastes. Ages 3-up.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.