THE PLANET OF LOST THINGS

A fanciful dream trip, unpromising in outline, that delights with the unexpected aptness and affinity of the fancies. Luke's dream of interplanetary travel occurs after his father tucks him in with a bedtime thought: ""If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it fall, does it make a sound?"" In the dream, Luke takes a spaceship past the planets, lands on one he doesn't know, and is met with the tremendous sound of a tree falling in a forest. Says Luke, ""This must be the place where all the sound that was never heard goes."" Later he encounters a woman and a soldier, who identify themselves as a missing person and the unknown soldier but can't tell him where he is: ""This place has never been discovered. As soon as it's found it's lost again. And as soon as it's named, its name is forgotten."" Now Luke can't remember where he left his spaceship--""that's par for the course up here,"" says the soldier--but he spots it from a mountain-top and returns to it, with the two lost people as guides. The trek takes them past the plain where extinct animals live and on to a place full of rabbits, glasses of water, and colorful scarves: ""This is where everything goes that magicians make disappear."" Illustrations of lollipop make-believe or cold surrealism would be fatal, but Pene du Bols imbues his charmingly tidy dreamscape with a delicate warm humor, a soft, dear, sunny sort of strangeness, and a captivating procession of ingeniously organized lost objects.