The Great Kettles: A Tale of Time
Kindergarten-Grade 3.  Joey, the boy in Morrissey's Ship of Dreams (Abrams, 1994), is off on another adventure. Here, he builds a time machine to take him to visit a friend in a nearby town, but it crashes in the Great Kettles, islands across the Sea of Time. This turn of events upsets Father Time, the Sandman, and the Man in the Moon because Joey's coming has stopped the clock and it won't start ticking again until he leaves. They build a new machine to take him home, where he learns that his friend is coming to visit him. Although the illustrations are spectacular, the text is disappointing. There's no good reason for time travel when Joey wants to go to a nearby town; the story seems to have been contrived as a vehicle for the artist's striking, realistic oil paintings?paintings of magic landscapes, strange characters, and ingenious devices such as telescopes and time machines. As in the first title, there are objects and characters from other children's books. For example, Father Time's flying machine seems inspired by that other great flying machine, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the Cow That Jumped Over the Moon rides the local train; and those well-known sleigh bells from Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express (Houghton, 1985) appear at the beginning and end of the book as decorative objects. The text and art just don't come together as a well-integrated, credible time fantasy.?Virginia Golodetz, St. Michael's College, Winooski, VTCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.