The Secret Box

As in her previous books, Lehman (The Red Book) develops the theme of children who stumble on unseen worlds. Here, three boys discover a box in the top floor of their urban boarding school that holds decades-old sepia photographs of a schoolboy, a postcard, and a map leading to a location on the coast. Picking out features of the old landscape amid the built-up, modern city around them, the boys make their way to a boardwalk amusement park, where they find the schoolboy of the photograph with a crowd of children who presumably have made the same trip. In closing, a pair of schoolchildren from an even more recent past find the box and set off for Seahorse Pier; Lehman implies that this cycle continues indefinitely, hall-of-mirrors style. Her tidily drafted watercolor-and-ink spreads make it easy to follow the action despite the mind-bending propositions it points toward; the idea that the children somehow cheat death is simultaneously eerie and liberating, as are the images of layers of earlier cities entwined with the present. A provocative example of the complexity that can be conveyed using only pictures. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)