THE SPECTACULAR ADVENTURES OF SOPHIE AND SEBASTIAN

“Spectacular adventures” is a hippo-sized overstatement in this story of Sophie, a dreamy hippo who’s hungry for action. She loves to draw, cook and collect comics, but more than anything, she wants to soar in the sky on a skateboard and leave her nay-saying herd behind to “sink or swim.” Even her best friend Sebastian, a bird, advises her to give up her dream. In time, Sophie fills her secret sketchbook with an action-packed comic starring Superhippo and Wonderbird that ends up amusing the grumbling hippos and, ultimately, satisfying Sophie’s I-gotta-be-me yearnings. Perhaps the message here is that the key to contentment is finding a passion that’s not preposterous. Unfortunately, the story seems contrived and lacks internal logic, its meanderings are occasionally hard to track and the abundant references to the largeness of hippos (sometimes in a big fat font) grow tiresome. The soft, color-saturated, often patterned gouache illustrations—pleasingly diverse in format and occasionally presented as vertical spreads—are childlike and appealing, but still don’t earn the book its puffed-up title. (Picture book. 5-8)