The Red Book

By Barbara Lehman

This is a wordless book I found searching for fantasy and science fiction books for our genre presentations. The front of the book does not even have a title, which immediately made me very curious. It won the Caldecott award in 2005, so I knew it was probably pretty good. I would not have picked it up on any given day, but I'm glad I did! My interpretation of the book was that a young girl finds a red book in the snow and when she finally opens it, she sees a boy on a far away island looking in the same book at her. She wants to go see this boy so she buys a huge bouquet of balloons and flies there. On the way she drops the book. The story then continues from the dropped book on the sidewalk and you see the girl reach the island to meet the boy. At the end, a boy on a bike sees the red book and takes it, and left me thinking about how the same thing would happen to that boy. It then got me thinking about how I, the reader was also looking in the "red book" and was yet another perspective. In other words, I was reading the book that a girl was reading, that a boy was reading all at the same time. What a crazy coincidence! I really loved this book and it made me realize how much I want to have all types of genres of books in my classroom, including wordless books because they are open for interpretation and can require as much effort as reading does!