The Crow (A Not So Scary Story)

This send-up of Poe's “The Raven” seems mostly an occasion to showcase the first-time author/artist's hand-dyed torn- and cut-paper collages. “One morning I woke up sleepy,/ came downstairs to something creepy,” says a small child of indeterminate gender, shown in pajamas peering through the front door at a crow perched on a fence. The child's eyes widen, vaudeville-style, as s/he notes the resemblance between the crow and the scary inhabitants of the child's imagination, all vividly pictured: a robber, a wizard and a pirate. Wandering far from the Poe original, Paul quickly abandons the project of duplicating the meter. She does a better job building up suspense visually, with tight shots of the child pulling the drapes apart, and she has even more fun with the spreads of the robber, the wizard and the pirate. Her collages favor bold compositions made up of surprisingly delicately patterned components. An enormous yellow-gold telescope dominates a view of the pirate on deck, for example, and readers will need to look more than once to realize that the roiling, white-crested waves in the picture are artfully torn paper, or to appreciate the careful suggestions of grain in the deck's wood floor. But the overall payoff is low (the child finally steps outside into the autumn morning, only to watch the crow fly off: “He was just as scared as me”), and there's little here to invite the repeat readings necessary for a close enough look at the art. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)