Line 135

A sleek lime-and-orange train bisects spindly b&w landscapes, carrying a girl to her grandmother’s house, in a story that trades the ultra-tall format of this team’s recent Sky High for an exaggerated horizontal trim size. The girl’s head is just visible in one of the train’s windows. “When you move between two places, it’s called traveling,” she explains. She uses the journey to think. “One day,” she vows, “I will travel everywhere.... I will know the entire world.” Her family is evidently less enthusiastic: “My mother and my grandmother say that I am too small to know the entire world.” Albertine’s graceful lines are all of perfectly even weight; the white pages look as if a ball of string has been unspooled on them. The scenery echoes the girl’s sense of adventure, growing imperceptibly more surreal as the journey goes on; cityscapes give way to swamps full of alien plant life and fields of bland, elephantine creatures. Zullo captures the girl’s final resolve with sensitivity: “My mother and my grandmother have forgotten what I have always known: It is possible.” Ages 4–6. (May)