J. Patrick Lewis
Christopher Myers's take on the greatest nonsense verse in the English-speaking world—a basketball face-off—combines brio and whimsy with more energy than a power forward…Award-winning books like Blues Journey, Jazz and Harlem, his Caldecott Honor book (these three were written by his father, Walter Dean Myers), have earned for Myers's art a grand and growing reputation. His Jabberwocky reflects once more his signature style and his willingness to take risks.
—The New York Times
Abby McGanney Nolan
…cleverly contemporizes the battle by setting it on a playground basketball court.…Myers's colors are bold and bright, his defined figures springing from watercolor-wash backgrounds and the typeface of the words conveying a jagged urgency.
—The Washington Post
From the Publisher
"'Tis a brillig sendoff; fans of all things toothy and terrifying will gyre and gimble in its wabe."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"The skillful use of color, light, and shadow makes the setting look otherworldly and the dramatic scenes all the more powerful. A vivid interpretation of the classic poem."—Booklist
"For those who like their nonsense epic and just a bit gory, the large scale scenes of glowering creatures and a triumphant warrior give new life to the poem."—School Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-10-21
A young hero takes on a truly humongous monster in the late Santore’s final, probably, and most melodramatic set of illustrations.
Nobly posed in a three-quarter-length portrait at the beginning, the White-presenting hero looks more wiry than ripped for all his bare chest and granite jaw—not the most likely sort to stand a chance against the immense, slavering, crocodilian beast that pounces in the climactic double gatefold. Still, one hack of the jeweled vorpal blade later, the creature’s minivan-sized head lies in a pool of gore. (How the hero contrives to go galumphing back with it is left to the imagination, as in the next scene he’s already raising his arms in triumph amid a cloud of parrotlike slithy toves to a chortled offstage “Callooh! Callay!”) Being positively crowded with artfully detailed tortoises, sundials, and badgerlike creatures with long, pointy noses, the dim and mossy tulgey wood makes a properly surreal setting; for extra monster thrills the artist inserts separate outsized views of the likewise slavering Bandersnatch, part boar and part tiger, and a fantastically plumed and toothy Jubjub bird that looks as if it could have a T. rex for breakfast. In his note the artist discusses his approach to the nonsense poem and properly echoes Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in encouraging readers to realize that “the words mean what they sound.”
’Tis a brillig sendoff; fans of all things toothy and terrifying will gyre and gimble in its wabe. (Picture book poem. 6-10)
