Amazon.com Review
Spare collage work and Sufi wisdom tell the tale of a boy in search of knowledge. Three-time Caldecott winner Ed Young (
Lon Po Po) returns here with a simple, cyclical story about giving, receiving, and unexpected rewards.
The boy (in a red, marbled robe and cute blue construction-paper shoes) hopes to gain knowledge from the wispy-bearded Grand Master, who appears to almost float as he assumes a sort of yogic Baked Potato Pose. But the master needs a carpet first, so the boy goes in search of the carpetmaker. The carpetmaker barks at the boy, "What about me? I need thread for weaving my carpets." Of course, the spinner woman needs goat hair to make thread, and the goatkeeper needs a pen for his goats in exchange for the hair. Naturally, the carpenter who makes pens for goats needs a wife... and so on and so on, until the boy finally finds a way to meet everyone's needs--including his own.
The flecked, stationery-style backgrounds look unnecessarily static here, but fortunately Young's energetic figures compensate with vibrant momentum. And What About Me? gets especially fun as the boy races to reach his final goal, and each colorful cut-out appears to jump onto the next page. (Ages 4 to 8) --Paul Hughes
From Publishers Weekly
Young's (Lon Po Po) adaptation of a Sufi wisdom tale has ragged edges, but his collage illustrations frequently achieve a nearly transcendent lightness and simplicity. A boy seeks knowledge from a Grand Master, who tells the boy he needs to bring him a carpet. The boy runs to a carpetmaker, who scoffs, "He has needs! What about me? I need thread for weaving my carpets." The thread-spinner needs goat hair, and so on down the line. Once the boy completes the string of transactions, he returns to the Grand Master with his carpet and his original request for knowledge. "You already have it," the Grand Master announces. The story's two morals are spelled out on the final page: "Some of the most precious gifts that we receive are those we receive when we are giving" and "Often, knowledge comes to us when we least expect it"; these seem unlikely to illuminate either the story or the titular question clearly enough for young readers. Young's visual sense, though, never falters, despite occasional lapses in the continuity of pictorial details. Restrained use of patterned and textured papers give the collages a wonderful airiness; as the boy runs to the carpetmaker, for example, his huge skein of lilac thread streams skyward behind him. The figure of the boy, in elegant robes and turban, is almost always seen against the backdrop of vast, empty fields of speckled gray-brown, which suggest landscapes simultaneously physical and metaphysical. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
