PENCILMAN

The fantastical inner workings of the pencil industry are revealed in an imaginative work by child author Darius Ceaser and his father, Sean Ceaser, with illustrations by Lanoue.

After a visually effective title page with yellow letters stylized to look like pencils, the story opens a bit confusingly. A miniature humanoid with illuminated symbols on his body slips into a keyhole, followed by three others like him. PencilMan is in charge of the four, who “take the lists / and reminders and calendar dates” from “digital slates,” or smartphones. The cleverness and effectiveness of the story’s rhymes and near rhymes varies; also, as the stolen letters are run through a machine, PencilMan puzzlingly mentions “go[ing] for berries” without further explanation. The scene then switches to a father looking at his smartphone—a realistic, familiar scenario; he’s missing lists, calendar items, and calls from the device. PencilMan’s machine, it’s revealed, has transformed the data into a pencil, which the father’s son uses. The story’s ending is satisfying. However, the work excessively focuses on the humanoids’ incongruous markings and unique names (“Limerie,” “Poe-Poe”), and PencilMan’s off-putting appearance is disappointing.

An uneven tale of a triumph of old versus new technology that might have been stronger if it had erased a few perplexing elements.