By Barbara Lehman
A girl in a snowy city finds a red book, and inside it is a boy on a beach, and he is holding a red book with her inside it, and it goes on from there.
A girl walking to school through a gray winter city finds a small red book lying in the snow. She opens it at her desk, and inside is a map, and the map draws closer and closer until it is an island, and on the island is a beach, and on the beach is a boy, and the boy is digging a small red book out of the sand. He opens it. And inside his book is the girl, at her desk, looking back at him. They see each other. So she walks out of school, buys a fistful of balloons from a street vendor, and lifts off, up over the rooftops and out across the ocean toward the island. On the way, she drops the red book. It falls all the way down into the street, where a boy on a bicycle picks it up and opens it, and his whole face changes. She reaches the beach. She meets the boy. And the book that started the whole thing is somewhere else now, in somebody else's hands, doing it again. Barbara Lehman never explains one bit of it.
The pictures are flat, clean, and simple, so nothing gets in a child's way, and yet the idea underneath is a real head-scratcher: a book inside a book inside a book, and the loop never closes. A child who wants a puzzle gets one they can actually crack by looking, going back a page, and checking, which is the same work as reading with the words taken out. Where it earns its place is the ending. It refuses to resolve, so a child has to decide for themselves what happened and then defend it, and that is a rare thing to hand a seven-year-old. It won a Caldecott Honor.