Always good for an offbeat tale, Yorinks and Egielski this time send a klutzy lad falling into and back out of a parallel dimension no different from ours—except that there are no curves there. The first time it happens, Mel is unable to get his parents or anyone else to take him seriously. The second time, he finds himself in a cubist version of his own home, attacked by pointy counterparts of himself and his family until he drops back into the view of his startled parents. Borrowing a trick from John Goodall (or maybe MAD magazine), scored pages can be folded over to allow readers to observe Mel’s vanishing act by flipping the resulting half-page back and forth. In his typically neat, precise illustrations, Egielski depicts a seemingly ordinary child (could be you!) stumbling between ordinary suburban surroundings and a world in which everyone and everything looks fresh from an encounter with an electrical socket. Stranger things have happened—but not often. (Picture book. 6-8)
