From: Kathleen Horning <horning>
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 10:08:42 -0600

Thanks to all of you who responded to my question about "No, David." It always seems to be most difficult to articulate what makes a funny simple-on-the-surface book distinguished, and you've all met the challenge. I'm glad the book is finding an appreciative audience among both children and adults.

Now, what about a more esoteric book like "Tibet" by Peter Sis? There is great mystery and pleasure in this book that draws me back again and again, although I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand the illustrations, or how all the little pieces relate to the whole.

I am particularly intrigued by the book's concluding pages, in which the father walks through a series of rooms that seem to sum up his years in Tibet, ending at the deep, dark room, where first he sees the Dalai Lama as a child, and then seems catapulted back to the present to find his adult son, sitting in another (the same?) deep, dark room. "It was all here, recorded on these walls, the past and the present." Amazingly, Peter Sis has deliciously blurred the lines that define space and time, something we sometimes see in a novel but I can't recall ever seeing before in a picture book.

What do others make of "Tibet?"
Received on Thu 11 Feb 1999 10:08:42 AM CST