LONELY BIRD

Lonely Bird makes a friend, loses him, rescues him, and finds him a new home.

Visually, Whiting’s picture-book debut is a charmer. Crafted from white paper, Lonely Bird is shaped like a bean, with just dots for eyes, a tiny triangle beak, and stick legs. She is placed amid cozy domestic scenes lushly realized in oils; she’s small, about the height of the spool of thread she keeps in her back-of-the-bookcase home. Her new friend, a scrap of paper ripped from a spiral-bound notebook (the ruffles are its many feet), is sweetly doglike, and when he’s sucked into the vacuum cleaner with a “swglooooooosh,” readers will be as distressed as Lonely Bird. Moments in the plot are likewise engaging, especially Lonely Bird’s long trek across the kitchen floor to the “monster’s lair,” where the vacuum cleaner slumbers, her descent into the very belly of that beast to retrieve her friend, and, finally, her decision to find her pal a new home: a sheet of paper with a drawing of a tree. But however cunning individual scenes may be, the story doesn’t hang together and will leave young listeners with questions. Why does Lonely Bird separate herself from her friend so easily? Is she really not very lonely after all? Why is that her name, then? And most puzzling of all: What is her relationship with the electrical outlet in the kitchen? The human family that inhabits Lonely Bird’s house presents white. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Leaves readers teetering between delight and bafflement.