Quentin Blake’s Fantastic Journeys
Quentin Blake. Candlewick Studio, $19.99 (64p) ISBN 978-1-5362-4508-0
Valedictory, elegiac, and playfully absurd, this collection of sketches by inaugural U.K. Children’s Laureate Blake offers a glimpse over the illustrator’s shoulder as an unguarded creative process unfolds. The book is organized into eight thematic sections (“Deliveries from Elsewhere,” “On the Wing,” and more), illustrated in black ink and gray washes. One series, “Trip Hazards” freezes spectacularly graceless comic stumbles mid-flight, including a birdwatcher tumbling over a sitting fowl, and a chef tripping over a push broom while futilely gripping
an impossibly tall wedding cake. Another section, “Wildlife Artists of the Year,” features en plein air sketchers blissfully immersed (in water to paint shore birds, pointing a headlamp at a wide-eyed owl) as they try to capture the natural world. Unexplained except for each section’s title, the drawings practically beg readers to invent a story. Through it all, the creator’s signature ink line has a life of its own—sometimes graceful, sometimes antic, and always conjuring worlds from empty paper and an inimitable imagination. Ages 7–9. (Oct.)
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Reviewed on: 07/17/2025
Genre: Children's