Shrinking Sam

The more people ignore young Sam—however benign their intentions—the smaller he gets. And it's not easy being small: from his pint-size viewpoint, a suddenly animated pencil threatens to eat him and his dog's sneeze packs a jet-propelled wallop. Finally, he simply slips down the drain. Luckily, a plucky fellow shrinkee named Izzy finds him ("This happens to me all the time" she informs him) and reverses the shrinking process simply by paying attention to him. Back home, Sam realizes that Izzy is right to take it all in stride; the neglect he experienced was only temporary. In fact, his family's affections soon make him feel "even bigger than before!" Latimer's (illustrator of The Prince's Bedtime ) text often evinces a golly-gosh didacticism ("At dinnertime, the peas on Sam's plate were so big , just one of them filled his whole tummy"), but her vibrant acrylic and collage pictures smooth over the narrative's bumpiness and keep the mood light. Although Sam can't catch a break for most of the book, his incredible shrinking adventure never turns nightmarish: each turn of the page reveals another giddily imagined, sweetly comic peril. Ages 4-8. (Mar.)