Not a Box

by Antoinette Portis, Antoinette Portis (Illustrator)

Overview

Don't miss this wholly original celebration of the power of imagination, winner of a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Award. This picture book with its visual humor and simple dialogue is great for fans of Mo Willems and Crockett Johnson. 

A box is just a box...unless it's not a box. From mountain to rocket ship, a small rabbit shows that a box will go as far as the imagination allows. This board book edition has sturdy pages and is a good size for the youngest readers.

Inspired by a memory of sitting in a box on her driveway with her sister, Antoinette Portis captures the thrill when pretend feels so real that it actually becomes real—when the imagination takes over inside a cardboard box, and through play, a child is transported to a world where anything is possible.

After reading this book aloud, continue the fun by drawing shapes like a triangle or circle, and asking your child what the triangle is NOT! 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061994425
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/27/2011
Series:	Not a Box
Pages:	28
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	1 - 6 Years

About the Author

Antoinette Portis is the author and illustrator of the New York Times bestselling Not a Box (a New York Times Best Illustrated Book and a 2007 Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor Book), Not a Stick, A Penguin Story (also chosen as a New York Times Best Illustrated Book), and Kindergarten Diary. She attended the UCLA School of Fine Arts and is a former creative director at Disney. Antoinette lives in Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

Full of mischief, the book's simple line drawings open up a world of imagination, humor and interactivity that make it a superb introduction to children's literature.
—The New York Times

Pamela Paul

A child can have as much fun with a box as with the toy packaged in it. So when a rabbit imagines a box to be a burning building that he heroically douses with a fire hose and a rocket that he pilots to outer space, children will relate. This gently humorous book celebrates the ingenuity of kids, whose games of make-believe can spin magic out of the simplest materials. (ages 3 to 6)
The February 2007 issue of Child magazine

Dedicated "to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes," this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner ("Are you still standing around in that box?") that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson-style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo's Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith's Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)

Kirkus Reviews