Dreams Are More Real Than Bathtubs

Using self-consciously childlike phrasings and digressions, the text introduces a girl who dreads the first day of school. Gay (Lizzie's Lion) presents the narrator as a tiny waif with two waist-length black braids and ""one gone tooth,"" who clutches a brown stuffed lion. The girl begs her mother to let her ""stay up early tonight"" in order to delay her anxious dreams of wild animals and magic: ""My mum says there is such things as fear-us tigers and witches because dreams are real. Dreams are more real than bathtubs. Dreams are more real than houses."" The plot itself unfolds like a dream, with non sequiturs galore. Gay, in her mixed-media illustrations drawn on handmade and textured papers, supports the hybrid descriptions of real and imaginary occurrences by refusing to ground the action. On one page the girl watches a scary movie on top of a planet, on the next she flies over a city in a red bathtub, and on the next she awakens in her bed. With scant transition, she's soon on the school playground, where bullies glare at her but one girl befriends her. The friendship seems to have an uplifting effect on the protagonist, but the story's message remains in doubt. The flighty plotting and pictures lack cohesion, and the too-precious diction gives no reassurance against the uncertainty the child faces through the course of the book. Ages 4-8. (Feb.)