#601 of 1001 · March 24, 2022

Today marks the occasion of my six-hundredth book review! As always, I am supremely grateful for your continued reading and kind feedback. Now then… Come journey with me into the bizarre, enchanting, and utterly unforgettable world of Holly Grant and @kgcampbellauthor’s Wee Sister Strange. The tale opens at sundown. A mysterious young girl wanders out of her rickety old shack and into the woods, where she seems oddly at home among the plants and animals in the gathering dusk. Up the trees she climbs, into the bog she dives, through the brambles she creeps, in a ceaseless hunt for some unspecified quarry. Finally, in a wild metafictional twist, she peeks through the window of a house and sees you, the reader, nestled in bed with a book. Moreover, the book appears to be this very book, Wee Sister Strange, suggesting a path of infinite recursion. At last, the girl has come to the end of her search, for what she wanted all along was a bedtime story. Satisfied to curl up outside and listen, she drifts off to sleep, a strange presence in a strange world. Grant’s language crackles with offbeat, vibrant energy, producing such eye-opening imagery as: “She drinks up the moon/Like a cat drinking cream./She drinks up the dark/Like it’s tea with the queen.” The poetic form proves as protean and unpredictable as its protagonist: some quatrains contain rhyme, some feature slant rhyme, and some do not rhyme at all. In his watercolor-and-colored-pencil illustrations, Campbell realizes the eldritch world of the night forest in a palette dominated by slate blue, cloudy gray, and yellow ochre. Just who or what is Wee Sister Strange? Where does she come from? Why is she here now? There may be no satisfying answers, but the tantalizing questions make for a uniquely delicious experience. #wee #sister #strange #night #forest #woods #bed #bedtime #book #books #childrensbooks #beautifulbooks #picturebook #picturebooks #picturebookillustration #picturebookart #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks