Where the World Ends: A Zip, Trik, and Flip Adventure

Zip, Flip, and Trik, anthropomorphic creatures with animalian features, lie on the ground, gazing up at the sky. “Where do the clouds go when we can’t see them anymore?” Zip asks. “Maybe they wind up where the world ends,” Flip says. They decide to go find that place, and they pack the essentials: skis, a torch, lots of peanuts, and more. Sunny naïf-style illustrations by Dek (Malo and the Merry-Go-Round) brim with charm as she imagines a world in which newsstands sell houseplants and cheeses, and an elderly woman lives in a flowered teapot. The threesome becomes a single traveling unit as those they meet send them hither and yon; the end of the world is, in text by Cali (Grown-ups Never Do That), at “the bottom of the next valley” and “the other side of the forest.” On they trudge, a bit tiresomely, through a country populated by green gnomes and goggle-eyed dachshunds. When they announce that they’ve arrived, it’s not quite clear how they know, though a map at the very end reveals, with humor, the trip they’ve actually made. The story line may be lax, but Dek’s inventive landscapes prove diverting. Ages 4–8. (Jan.)