BORIS'S GLASSES

This book about eyeglasses starts out endorsing clear vision, but ends up touting a blinkered approach to reality. In an unprepossessing town of rodents, Boris, a tawny yellow hamster, struggles to see his TV and to read fine print. Boris visits the optometrist, a gray woodchuck, and comes away with new glasses and two weighty vocabulary words. He learns he is "astigmatic.... It's probably hereditary." Boris wears his thick round glasses and his multisyllabic condition with pride. He gets a management job by boasting about his astigmatism ("We're always looking for clever people," the boss rat says), and he notices the town baker, another hamster, with fresh eyes ("I had no idea Gudrun was so pretty!" he thinks). Yet 20/20 vision has a down side. Boris's house is a mess and the Ignatz-like mice he oversees at the factory "are staring back at him." Appalled, he removes his glasses and leaves his workplace, a brick compound with a barred gate. Without his specs, he can pretend that ugliness doesn't exist: "Everything is nice and fuzzy, just like he's used to." Swedish team Cohen and Landström (Olson's Meat Pies) depict a workaday village populated with low-key ferrets and beavers. Cohen writes in a matter-of-fact voice, while Landström limns the milquetoast hamster in subdued earth-tone inks and watercolors. They tell the story with gentle good humor, but the outcome is dubious. Poor vision becomes an excuse for ignorance, and Boris ultimately decides that ignorance is bliss. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)