Tangled: A Story About Shapes

There is trouble at the playground when a pink circle gets stuck inside a jungle gym. In Comstock’s retro-feeling illustrations, shape after colorful shape tries to help, each getting caught, until the playground structure is a chaotic tangle of geometric characters (“What a horror! What a mess! The shapes could not untwine,” Miranda writes). Just then, a “straight and narrow line,” comes bounding onto the scene. After eyeing the angles, she conjures up a plan and deputizes a prism and a sphere, who together form themselves into a lever and free their shape friends from the jam. Though how the lever’s force does what the stuck shapes cannot is not particularly clear, the characters’ willingness to help and their collaborative problem-solving make for an animated tale of community. Postscript material includes a chart of geometric shapes found in the book. Ages 4–8. [em](June) [/em]