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When Henry Caught Imaginitis (Nick Bland, Scholastic, $19.99 hb, ISBN 9781741690309, April) ***

Henry is an overly methodical boy, preferring sums and order to playing or daydreaming. Luckily, he catches a fortuitous case of ‘Imaginitis’, a condition where silly thoughts invade one’s head in a random manner and beg to be acted on. Suddenly, his staid, grey world is a much more colourful and unpredictable place. The palette of the illustrations is used to good effect here as Henry’s black and white pencilled life is slowly invaded and then consumed by vivid hues, from a first lone green feather to a final happy spread of a technicoloured Henry as king of his new imaginary world. As Henry’s ‘silly thoughts’ are illustrated only in pictures, not text, adult and child readers could enjoy elaborating on these together. The increasingly popular smaller square format of this book works well: it’s appealing for children to handle and a good size for bedtime reading, but still large enough for library or classroom use. It presumably also influences the attractively low price point. It would make a worthwhile addition to a home, preschool or junior school library for use with a three to seven age range, serving also to remind adult readers that life is better for being seasoned with a quirky, colourful thought or three.

Jenny Gorman is a bookseller at Megalong Books in New South Wales

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker