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Books

Delivering Dreams charming

Courtesy

When you are a child, your world is often constrained to home, school and the places you read about in books. A book or a letter becomes an invitation to explore the outside world, a chance to experience new and alien things. This is the story told in Lori Preusch’s first children’s book, Delivering Dreams.

In the book, a girl waits every day for a letter from her globe-trotting grandfather. He writes her of safaris and pyramids, the wild West and exotic food. Through these letters, her mailbox becomes a door to another world, one that takes her on fantastic adventures that she cannot have at home. One day, the letters stop coming. The wait for another letter from her grandfather becomes unbearable. When she feels like she can wait no longer, a wonderful surprise shows up in her mailbox that was beyond anything she hoped for.

The writing is wonderful. The prose has a fantastic rhythm that drives the story, pulling the reader from one fantasy to the next. The rhyme scheme helps convey the exoticness of the places the grandfather goes, while helping to convey the fun that the girl has reading about his adventures. The story, while simple, is extremely charming and heartfelt.

The relationship the girl has with her grandfather is charming. The idolization of the grandfather by his granddaughter and friendship that exists between the two is conveyed extremely well without being explicitly stated, adding to the feeling of support that the girl receives from him.

The art, which Preusch is known for, is what truly drives the book. Each picture contains the girl and her mailbox off having the grand adventures her grandfather writes to her about. The pictures mix realistic settings with fantastic details, demonstrating to the reader that fantastic things exist in the real world and vice versa. It conveys the excitement that the girl feels when imagining her grandfather’s adventures, and shows how much she longs to go with him, even though it is never explicitly stated in the prose.

Preusch uses contrasting colors to draw the eye to the subject of each picture, skillfully using lines to convey motion that makes every scene seem as if it is moving.

This book has been 10 years in the making, and it was well worth the wait. An adventure book for children that is charming to adults, with imaginative drawings and relatable plot. It would be a fantastic book for any bedtime story.

If you go

What:

Lori Preusch will be speaking about her book, Delivering Dreams, which will be available for purchase.

When:

6:30 p.m. Nov. 4

Where:

Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave.

For more information:

Call Maria’s at 247-1438.



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