Whispar, a young magician, sets out to claim the Cloak of Illusion from Mistry, the retiring ruler of the World of Illusion, by solving a series of colorful conundrums. The reader plays along with Whispar?tries to, at least?by looking for answers in the madcap, elaborately overcrowded pictures of scenes from Mistry's enchanted, M.C. Escher-esque kingdom. Counting the well-hidden cats in Task 2 is challenging, yet easy enough for the target audience to accomplish, but finding a man "in a hat with a leaf" in a riot of minuscule, multicolor shapes, faces, fruits, animals, clowns and many, many hats will test even the most seasoned Waldo sleuth. McEwan (The Little Penguin) puts his own playful spin on many standard optical illusions?the facing profiles/vase; like-sized objects that seem to grow toward a vanishing-point background?and comes up with some of his own in an amusing puzzle portrait gallery. Most solutions (listed in reverse print on the last page) call for painstaking scrutiny, and younger readers may need a hand in interpreting the rhyming riddles. This book requires a good deal of patience?another way of saying that it will keep attentive puzzlers busy for hours. Ages 8-up.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 3-5?In this alternative for Waldo-hunters, Whispar, an apprentice magician, has his powers of observation and deduction tested 10 times (despite the title), and earns the coveted Cloak of Illusion. Children will most likely ignore the thin plot for McEwan's jellybean colored, three-quarter page or larger landscapes, which feature hundreds of concealed animals and tiny, stylized jesters with amusingly mismatched body parts, as well as skewed points of view and multiple examples of every sort of line-based optical illusion. Some of the tests are trick questions, while others require going back to previous scenes; impatient or frustrated viewers will find a list of solutions (printed in reverse) at the end. The array of illusions give this browsing item a bit of extra appeal.?John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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