What Goes Around Comes Around

As in McGuire's Night Becomes Day and The Orange Book, stylish retro graphics are the main event in this picture book, its whirlwind plot notwithstanding. Early on, a not-so-innocent-looking boy stands next to an open window in New York City (``When he was asked if he had seen his sister's doll, he said `no'""). Meanwhile, a stick-figure-style doll-its mouth set in a nervous line and its three blue hairs standing on end-ricochets off the street, nearly causes a traffic accident and lands on a box heading out to sea. The doll's itinerary, charted on a map on the endpapers, includes Casablanca, Shanghai and San Francisco, with stops on a ship and a plane along the way; the doll bumps into a leaping camel in Cairo and a green-and-red snake in Bombay. In the end the toy bounces back through the New York window, popping the culprit upside the head (``And POW! What goes around comes around''). McGuire's compositions pair static silhouettes with line drawings and gestural sketches that suggest perpetual motion; all the images are geometric and stencil-perfect, softened by grainy colored-pencil details and an abundance of white negative space. His spreads give a wide angle on the action, and his wide-eyed, startled animals-among them an elephant and a honking red bird-add to the sense of urgency. Ages 5-up. (Sept.)