It’s Not Easy Being Number Three

Dernavich, a New Yorker cartoonist with a distinctively angular and chunky scratchboard style, makes his children’s book debut with an offbeat story of a numeral in search of a meaningful existence. Number Three “doesn’t want to be a number anymore,” so he leaves the quantifying life behind (and his fellow numbers in the lurch) to explore life as a shape. Dernavich has fun seeing threes in all kinds of places (like the steering wheel of an airplane), and there’s an enjoyable seek-and-find aspect to the story as readers locate Three standing in for the toes of an elephant, the loops of a shoelace, the hooks of a coatrack, and more. Three’s career explorations start to drag on after a while, but the conceit comes together in the final pages, when Three goes undercover and discovers, à la It’s a Wonderful Life, that the world without him is a pretty bleak place. By book’s end, the poker-faced quality of Dernavich’s renderings makes the possibility of an entirely numberless existence feel fresh and funny. Ages 3–7. [em]Agent: Sorche Fairbank, Fairbank Literary Representation. (Feb.) [/em]