Not a Box [Hardcover]

Antoinette Portis (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

Grade Level: P and up

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.

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 and inside a cardboard box, a child is transported to a world where anything is possible.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

PreSchool-Grade 1—In bold, unornamented line drawings of a rabbit and a box, the author-illustrator offers a paean to the time-honored imaginative play of young children who can turn a cardboard box into whatever their creativity can conjure. Through a series of paired questions and answers, the rabbit is queried about why he is sitting in, standing on, spraying, or wearing a box. Each time, he insists, "It's not a box!" and the opposite page reveals the many things a small child's pretending can make of one: a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a robot. One important caveat: the younger end of the intended audience is both literal and concrete in their approach to this material. The box itself, drawn as a one-dimensional rectangle, will be perceived by preschoolers to be flat and not readily understood as three-dimensional. Furthermore, those children are likely to interpret the "box's" transformation to be "magic," while five- and six-year-olds are able to make the cognitive conversion from flat rectangle to three-dimensional box and to understand that the transformation has been made by the rabbit's own imagination. Both audiences will enjoy the participatory aspect of identifying each of the rabbit's new inventions. Knowledgeable adults will bring along a large box to aid in understanding and to encourage even more ideas and play.—Kate McClelland, Perrot Memorial Library, Old Greenwich, CT
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Wrapped in basic, grocery-bag-brown paper, this streamlined book visualizes a child's imagined games. "Why are you sitting in a box?" reads the opening page, opposite an image of a small rabbit, drawn in the simplest, unshaded lines, who appears next to a square. "It's not a box," reads the text, presumably in the rabbit's defiant voice, on the next page, and equally simple red lines overlay the black-lined rabbit and box to show a speeding roadster. In the following spreads, the questioner (a clueless adult?) continues to ask about the rabbit's plans, while the little voice answers with the book's protest of a title. This owes a large debt to Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955). And as in Johnson's classic, the spare, streamlined design and the visual messages about imagination's power will easily draw young children, who will recognize their own flights of fantasy. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 32 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins (December 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061123226
• ISBN-13: 978-0061123221
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 9.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,898 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Children's Books > Animals > Rabbits

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple, beautiful fun, December 15, 2006

By 

Kelly Herold "Big A little a" (Smalltown, Midwest) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Not a Box (Hardcover)

Pay attention, folks! Are you looking for the perfect book for a preschool child this holiday season? Then I've got the book for you: Antoinette Portis' "Not A Box."

Every so often you run across a book that screams "instant classic." "Not A Box" is that book for me this year.

As you can tell from the cover, "Not A Box" features simple, iconic line drawings of a rabbit and a box. Portis dedicates the book "to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes" and celebrates the magic a large box brings to a child.

The book opens with a question: "Why are you sitting in a box?" The young rabbit replies, offended, "it's not a box." And the illustration shows him sitting in a racecar. And, so on. Rabbit climbs a mountain, fights a fire, wears a robot costume. His box is anything, but "it's NOT NOT NOT NOT a box!"

What it is, though, is highly, highly, highly, highly recommended.

77 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Whatta Box, January 29, 2007

By 

E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Not a Box (Hardcover)

Recently there was an article in Publisher's Weekly describing the recent downturn in picture book sales and what publishing companies were going to do to combat this trend. Possible solutions that were mentioned included making picture books as sparkly, glittery, and full of eye-catching razzle dazzle-ish as possible. No mention was made of whether the stories matching these bombastic visual monstrosities would be any good. So after hearing a story like this it does my withered little heart good to know that there is still room out there for a book like, "Not a Box". "Not a Box" is not flashy. It doesn't seduce the child's visual senses with tacky holographic papered stimuli. Drawn with meticulous care and simple imagery, author Antoinette Portis's book is a sublime joy to both look at and to read. In an age where books have to be either sporting their own personal lighting system or go for the gross-out jokes to get attention, make some room in your home for this small, unassuming delight.

As the story opens and the reader flips through the publication and title page, a small bunny spots and tugs away a box that it has found. Now we see the bunny sitting quietly within his treasure as someone (perhaps the reader) asks, "Why are sitting in a box?" A turn of the page and it's the same bunny in the same box, but now red lines have appeared around them to sketch out a fabulous racing car. The opposite page is now bright red and at the bottom of it sit the words, "It's not a box." Turn the page and now the bunny is standing on top of the box. When asked why, the red lines have turned the box into an alpine peak with the bunny at the crest of the summit. "It's not a box." And so it goes until the reader finally asks of the bunny (with, perhaps, a note of impatience in the question), "Well, what is it then?" The bunny ponders this, in the same position as Rodin's, "The Thinker", then comes up with a fabulous answer. As we see it blasting off into space it waves good-bye from its rocket-box to say, "It's my Not-a-Box!" The last image is of a distant bunny soaring past the planet Saturn.

Who amongst us was enamored of cardboard boxes when they were young? Yeah, exactly. All of us. This book brought to mind those old Peanuts comic strips where Snoopy would sit on top of his doghouse and become a WWI Flying Ace. It's that same thought of taking the familiar and giving it that added twist of imagination to make it fantastic. More impressive is the fact that the readership for this book is vast. Both kids who can read on their own and the youngest of children will be able to understand the sense of play going on here. Plus, and I can't stress this enough, there's a kind of child-friendly wit at work here. Kids will get the joke of the bunny (who's sexless state allows it to be either a boy or a girl depending on the reader) that continually contradicts the person asking it these seemingly inane questions.

As for the art, Portis's style is so simple that it brings to mind the work of Netherlands' artist Dick Bruna (creator of Miffy). Thick black or red lines make each and every image completely understandable to young readers. The text is also simple and spare enough that no lengthy explanations are required. Fans of good design will applaud Portis's sense of clean lines and meticulous colors. Only three colors ever really make it into the book: red, light brown, and a light cream. And while I would not have plucked those three as ideal picture book mates myself, here they work together in a kind of perfect little syncopation.

Recently someone asked me to recommend picture books with simple words that also had a heart to them. This kind of a request is less easy than it sounds, and I had to admit to being a little bit stumped. That is, until I chanced upon "Not a Box". Consider this the quiet, funny, unassuming antidote to the crass world of marketing out there. A classic.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Not-A-Box!, February 2, 2007

By 

Anne-Marie Gilliland (Near D.C., USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Not a Box (Hardcover)

I remember the lure of a box, especially those wonderfully long refridgerator sized boxes. This book evokes that magic of the imagination. Even the cover of the book mimics it. It is brown paper with no dust jacket, on the front it proclaims in weight in oz. On the back a red arrow points out "this end up".

Inside is a classic story. A bunny with a box (or as learned by the end, the bunny's "not-a-box") and a powerful imagination. Each page the bunny is asked what he is doing with the box and he always replies it is "not a box" and the reader gets a visual explaination of what the bunny is doing. Climbing a mountain--instead of standing ontop of a box.

This book is a treasure and would be great to read outloud to a group of younger kids.