WHEN YOU LOOK UP

A lonely child encounters a new diversion in a new home.

The story begins with Lorenzo, a little boy with blue, gogglelike glasses and pink skin, preparing to move to a new house with his mother. In the car, a classic “when I was your age…” from Mom sets the tone in an unsuccessful attempt to pull him from his cellphone to admire the scenery from the car window or the spacious property of their new house. The structure is strange and empty of all but unfamiliar smells and a peculiar notebook hidden in an antique writing desk. Upon Lorenzo’s opening it, the pages change from a lush, cool-toned palette to vibrant sunflower-yellow, providing a background for candy-colored papercut illustrations depicting fantastical stories of cats riding bicycles, tiny teal quail building mysterious machines, and more. The stories reflect Lorenzo’s surroundings with the distorted logic of a dream, leading him to search for and eventually uncover the truth behind them—his discoveries cleverly depicted with bright cut paper laid over the painterly gouache “real world.” Alas, due to unnecessary moralization and a string of uniformly white human characters broken only by a singular, uncomfortably depicted black man, it fails to positively reflect the magic of the world beyond its pages. In the simultaneously publishing original Spanish text, readers will enjoy much more amusing use of onomatopoeia and side commentary from background characters.

Unconvincing text distracts from utterly enchanting illustration.