102

In an intricately wrought, ambitious picture book that recalls works by Chris Van Allsburg and David Wiesner, Caldecott Medalist Cordell creates a humane adventure that unfolds in and around a cozy abode, peppering the telling with a reappearing number that adds mysterious significance. Sent home from school on October 2 with a fever that soon rises to 102 °F, young George spots a mouse transporting a tiny black object (“Was it... a bean?”) and, before retiring to bed, persuades his mother to keep the creature in an old tank. At 1:02 a.m., George is awakened by a cricket guide, and, leaping from his bed in a series of ever-smaller ghostly blue figures, shrinks to “almost a cricket” size himself. He’s led into a wall and through narrow passages, then outdoors to the base of a large oak, the Lilliputian dwelling of a mouse family uncannily like his own, where a young mouse also has a fever. When George learns that their father has not yet returned after heading out to fetch the last bean for a healing 102-bean soup, the boy knows just what to do. Delicate artwork finely worked in multicolor ballpoint pen pulses with warmth and inventiveness across this intriguing pocket-size quest, whose dreamlike narrative gently hints at the line between fantasy and reality. Human characters are portrayed with pale skin. Ages 6–8. Agent: Rosemary Stimola, Stimola Literary Studio. (Apr.)