Kaleidoscope

This is a remarkable book from author and illustrator Brian Selznick. Just as a kaleidoscope rearranges the same elements into different patterns through the use of mirrors and reflections, so Selznick offers twenty or so short episodes, arranged as morning, afternoon and evening, which are complete in themselves and also have a perceptible but mysterious relationship with one another. Selznick’s illustrations are interfiled with the stories. Many are designs that might be seen in a kaleidoscope. Others are evocations of the stories that follow. All are in black and white. In the tales themselves, characters and places recur but are changed and reordered, relationships are seen from different angles; situations echo and re-echo as memory and dream; there are tangles of reality and possibility, realised and interpreted in familiar story forms that are made unfamiliar by their juxtaposition. It might be possible to solve the book like a puzzle, to rearrange its strange shapes so that they lock together like a jigsaw. The ache of loneliness, the wonder of the world, the comfort of friendship and the pain of loss are all to be found; and deeply felt. Yet it is perhaps best to enjoy each story as it comes, to let the tales dazzle you with their changing forms, and to let the novel work its magic as it will.