Are We There Yet? - Hardcover

Nina Laden is the author and illustrator of many books for children, including Peek-a Who?, The Night I Followed the Dog, and When Pigasso Met Mootisse. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Adam McCauley has illustrated many picture books and chapter books for children, including Mom and Dad Are Palindromes, Ann and Nan Are Anagrams, and the Time Warp Trio series. Adam lives in San Francisco, California.

K-Gr 2-The mundane car ride question and standard answers are in speech bubbles set against landscapes that get increasingly more fantastical with every page turn. The journey to Grandma's begins in a room that opens into a garage where the car and the boy's mother are waiting. Everything seems normal enough, though there remains a slight feeling of purposefulness in the choice of having a picture of a surfer riding a wave framed on the wall, a pet frog in the aquarium, and a parrot perched on a stand alongside the detritus of a child's play-drawings, toys, and stuffed animals. The first few stages of the excursion are regular cityscapes where animals similar to the boy's toys may go unnoticed, since they are drawn to scale and do not seem at all out of place. As the road winds through more audacious scenes (farm to desert to a coastline matching the surfer picture, under the sea, through outer space), the figures become either more prominent or incongruent with their surroundings. Readers will enjoy coming to this realization and spotting the familiar objects, making the boy's final assessment of the trip all the more humorous. VERDICT Visual storytelling at its best. Get ready for multiple readings.-Joanna K. Fabicon, Los Angeles Public Libraryα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.