SCRIBBLE

Two children’s drawings come to life in a clear case of, as the blurb so aptly puts it, “scribbling rivalry.” After big sister Emma makes a slighting comment about her “scribble-kitty,” Lucie covers Emma’s slightly more elaborate picture of a sleeping princess in furious scrawls of crayon. When Scribble-Kitty decides to see what a Princess looks like, though, the tangle of scrawls becomes an obstacle, and it’s only with help from a repentant Lucie that the lines are pulled aside into a neat coil. When Kitty reaches the Princess and kisses her, she wakes up and they decide to get married. Coming back into view, Emma protests that they can’t—“But they did. And they all lived Happily Ever After. As drawings sometimes do.” In panels that shift and overlap, the children are drawn realistically to keep the boundaries between real and play worlds separate—but like its ancestor Harold and the Purple Crayon, the unselfconscious (at least until the end) exploration of those boundaries here is liable to spark young imaginations. (Picture book. 5-7)