This enchanting book, marvelously written (and obviously thoroughly researched) by McDonald, and gloriously illustrated by Goembel (Iguana surfing is a masterpiece), is destined to become for Key West what ducklings are to Boston and Eloise is to New York.
At the start of MY BABY (Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16; ages 3 to 8), a slight and enchanting book written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter, a child in Mali learns from her mother how to make the traditional handmade mud-dyed cloth called bogolan.
As a counterpoint, he also cites Italo Calvino's Marco Polo, who in that enchanting book Invisible Cities tells Kublai Khan: "Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else".
The Way Back Home Successful children's operas are rarities, but English National Opera's latest venture, based on Oliver Jeffers's enchanting book and devised by Katie Mitchell and Vicki Mortimer with music by Joanna Lee, looks to have more going for it than most.
"Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, 'Grow, grow,' " is taken from the Talmud, but readers of this enchanting book may end by seeing Ackerman as a bit of a guardian spirit herself, committed enough to march around with a flashlight on a cold night, blanketing her tender-petaled roses in plastic and sheeting her tropical hibiscus and impatiens in cotton.
A really good book that gets you so enthralled you just can't wait to stop everything you're doing and get home to that enchanting book.
Children express their opinion of such enchanting books by saying: "Here!
It's no castle, but the British Library will channel its inner Hogwarts next year with a collection of enchanting books and artifacts from the wizarding world of Harry Potter.
For, despite being enchanting, this book also has the power to disturb.
Enter Otto, the glassy-faced dreamer of Ali Bahrampour's enchanting first book, Otto: The Story of a Mirror (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16; ages 4 to 8).
There is the enchanting Summer Book that Scandinavian lovers give each other at the same sort of emotional moments as their southerly counterparts give each other Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet.
