THE WONDER THING

Vibrant illustrations with the look of linoleum block prints carry readers on an absorbing journey across longitudes and latitudes. Each scene is accompanied by an elliptic caption, beginning with a long series of adverbial phrases (``High above the peaks/On the wild mountaintop/Deep underground/In the swirling mist'') culminating in five bullet-like metaphors and almost resolved in a rhymed couplet. Hathorn (Way Home, 1994, etc.) strings her text through the art like a barely visible thread in the form of an extended, poetic riddle whose answer is ``water.'' It's rather enigmatic at first, but successive readings prove it to be a suspenseful counterpart to the pictures. The central element in Gouldthorpe's pictures—not always the most obvious one—is water, depicted in all its different forms in a great variety of settings, from sprawling scenes of oceans and mountains to lyrical miniatures of vehicles and plants. These prints have a wet-paint freshness that seems to evoke smells and sounds, as well as sights. (Picture book. 4-7)