AMERICANA ADVENTURE

Garland’s attempt to conduct a seek-and-find tour across the United States and through its history quickly collapses into a confusing jumble of faces, places and quotes. A perfunctory plotline provides an everylad with a rhymed itinerary that leads from the Liberty Bell to San Francisco—but many of the stops along the way are either generic or random collages of iconic images from various decades. Each stop is also crowded with full-bleed mixes of digitally painted bystanders and portraits of historical figures, snatches of rock ’n’ roll lyrics, coins, eagles and the occasional (adult) book title. The presidents all show up in one scene or another, captioned with nicknames like “Sword of the Revolution” for George Washington, or “Poppy” and “Dubya” for the Bushes. Rather than provide a visual key at the end, the author supplies a hard-to-use subject index. Unlike Peter Spier’s Train of States (2004) or Dan Yaccarino’s Go, Go, America! (2008), this is unlikely to provide children with either basic facts or more than a few moments of entertainment. (Picture book. 8-10)