Children's literature is full of stories that promote reading books as a way to have an otherworldly adventure. In the alluring, wordless picture book The Book from Far Away, Bruce Handy and Julie Benbassat switch it up: an otherworldly adventure leads to a book.
As the story begins, a child enjoying some solo reading time in the woods sees an alien spacecraft land and release what appears to be a family of three, including a kid. The human child watches as the family picnics on geometrically interesting food, cavorts in the grass with glowing objects, and then packs up and flies away. The human child is disappointed, but what's this? The family has left behind what looks like an astrolabe with semicircular pages. The human child is absorbed in the imagery when the alien child returns to claim the forgotten object, leading to a meaningful exchange--in more senses than one.
The Book from Far Away is beautifully conceived by Handy (The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in its Mouth), and Benbassat (The Screaming Hairy Armadillo and 76 Other Animals with Weird, Wild Names) dazzles with an earth-toned palette that goes hybrid when the human world is infiltrated by the golds and blues of the alien family's skin, hair, and attire. Meanwhile, there's humor to be found on the outskirts of the illustrations. Take, for example, a frog that doesn't know what to make of the aliens' pet, which resembles a crocodile crossed with a vintage vacuum cleaner. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author