Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 01/01/2010 Urban daily life meets magical realism in this quirky tale of a boy overcoming shyness. Young Paul “simply didn’t like school, and school didn’t seem to like him.” Perhaps this is because of his unusual ideas. For example: Is the moon really a hole cut into the sky? A morning spent wandering his high-rise leads to meeting Molly, a wacky artist who drags him and his parents to see her brother, a recluse whose war experiences led him to hatch the same theory. If only there was a way to reach the moon to find out! Though rarely laugh-out-loud funny, Almond employs all manners of amusements (a flying dog, an obsessive elevator inspector, the truth behind the moon) while never losing sight of some refreshing realities: Paul’s parents are a real presence, and the city feels appropriately dense. Almond even pulls off one unforgettable, cinematic scene involving the high-rise denizens reaching from their windows to help lift a ladder to the building’s roof. Dunbar’s full-color illustrations, many stretching across two pages, nimbly dodge the prose. - Copyright 2010 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 05/01/2010 Paul is a quiet boy, neither particularly brave nor especially smart, but he’s full of strange ideas. When he decides one day that he’d like to touch the sky, he meets a slew of people with similarly hare-brained notions as he makes his way up his apartment building to the twenty-ninth floor. There’s Clara and her dog Clarence, a poodle who thinks he can fly; Harry, a rather self-important jogger; and Mabel, who would prefer to be called Molly, and who introduces Paul to her even more eccentric brother, Benjamin, a man with a penchant for wearing paper bags over his head. The siblings not only help Paul to touch the sky, they convince him to use a ladder to test a theory that the moon is really just a hole in the sky, a supposition that turns out to be true when Paul manages to climb right into that celestial sphere. As in his recent My Dad’s a Birdman (BCCB 7/08), Almond attempts to blend whimsy with realism, but the balance is off here, and the cleverness of the prose simply can’t make up for the story’s lack of substance. Paul’s foray into the moon is by far the most interesting part of the tale, but it’s also the briefest, coming only after a parade of sometimes frustratingly quirky characters, many of whom add very little to Paul’s journey. Dunbar’s pencil, watercolor, and collage illustrations reflect a more authentic playfulness, and the two spreads showing the various aerial navigators and contraptions floating around in the moon add an explosion of movement and joy to what is an otherwise rather stagnant plot. Nevertheless, young readers who enjoyed Birdman’s sense of adventure and peculiar characters may still find satisfaction in this new outing. KQG - Copyright 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

School Library Journal - 05/01/2010 Gr 2–4— When timid, unadventurous Paul decides to go to the top of his apartment building to "touch the sky," it's a big deal. On the way he meets his neighbors, worries his parents, and makes a new friend in eccentric Mabel/Molly, who lives in the penthouse apartment and actually helps him touch the sky. Soon he discovers that the moon is a hole in the sky that is full of formerly airborne people and things caught there. It's all whimsical, totally unbelievable, and full of exhortation to live life, ask questions, don't make war, test out theories, be courageous, make friends, and so forth. Full-color and line illustrations lend cozy appeal for those beginning chapter-book readers who can tolerate the thematically overstuffed, disjointed, and arbitrary plot that gains Paul a new member of his family, new friends, and perhaps a new outlook on his sheltered life.—Susan Hepler, formerly at Burgundy Farm Country Day School, Alexandria, VA - Copyright 2010 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

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