Doodler Doodling

From School Library Journal Kindergarten-Grade 6–There's lots to look at and lots to ponder in this playful and powerful paean to the creative process, to the astonishing malleability of visual and verbal imagery, and to the evolution of ideas. Picture this: "Painters painting./Climbers climbing./Climbers painting./Painters climbing./Painters painting climbing climbers." Gelman's 21 words and Zelinsky's computer-manipulated art morph merrily here, demonstrating the power of perspective and the truth that even a tiny twist on the expected can effect a transmogrification (after all, people climb, but so do animals and kites and roses). Zelinsky uses bright, loose watercolor to paint the earnest girl whose doodles are not confined by letters or lines or the bounds of the notebook paper on which she draws with her nifty, fat-barreled, multicolor-cartridge ballpoint pen. As her innovatively visual definitions of deceptively simple sentences expand and gather momentum, viewers are treated to an ever-wider view of her work, until only a gatefold can accommodate the product of her invention run amok. ("Painters hugging bakers climbing throwers painting huggers mowing fliers throwing climbers flying mowers baking teachers teaching.") While her sophisticated and comic cartoon art is assuredly