Book Description
for Museum Trip by Barbara Lehman
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
A field trip to an art museum turns quickly unsettling for a young boy who gets separated from the rest of his class. Wandering alone through the halls, he finds a seemingly secret gallery. Inside is a display case filled with six small mazes. Captivated, he is drawn into them—literally. As the boy traverses through and between each of the mazes, he has moments of worry and moments of triumph. His journey culminates with a surprise at the center of the sixth and final maze before a turn of the page finds him once again on the outside looking in, and shortly thereafter reunited with his class. Lehman’s marvelous wordless story is a journey of the imagination that invites both literal and metaphorical interpretations. Children might connect the mazes the boy wanders to the feeling of being lost in the mazelike galleries of a museum. They might recognize the feeling of “getting lost” in something they find fascinating. Flight of fancy or expression of possibility? Lehman’s leaves the door open for this story to be either, or anything else the reader desries. (Ages 6–9)
CCBC Choices 2007 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2007. Used with permission.