Night Fell at Harry's Farm

""We drove from the city on curving roads,"" begins this offbeat and childlike book, Hedlund's first. What follows is a straightforward story of a family's excursion--including numerous wrong turns and unplanned detours--to their friend Harry's farm for an evening cookout and fun around the campfire. Conveyed in an unadorned, declarative voice, the tale takes on the plainspoken lyricism of a child's narration, while the presentation teeters, as children often do when relating a story, between reality and fantasy (""That night I dreamed that the fireflies carried Harry away. But he was back in time to make breakfast""). Hedlund renders her sweet, cartoonlike art in dense pastels; her mildly representational landscapes are dominated by swooping and undulating lines, while her characters, with their slightly angular faces and wiry bodies, seem to float through the settings. A few spreads are broken into triptychs, supplying visual rhythm as well as replicating the child narrator's divided attention as it focuses on both details and the overall setting. Hedlund distracts with an unnecessary attempt at suspense: when Harry is finally encountered, the reader is at first shown only his red cowboy boots--there's no subsequent revelation that justifies this oblique introduction. Ages 3-up. (May)