5/22/2023 0 Comments Marveltown by Bruce McCall![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() If short on story, this is long on innovation-a good choice for readers with a healthy visual imagination. Then he concocts a rickety plot where the adults' robots go haywire, B-movie style, and the children defeat the robots with their own devices. About half the book is devoted to marvelous or mischievous inventions (sample: “Eli's bedroom hologram was diabolical: Dad saw spick-and-span perfection, when the reality was a place you wouldn't want to live in”), which McCall paints in a meticulous, deadpan style reminiscent of William Joyce's Dinosaur Bob In the long-distance views, people appear an inch tall and the sci-fi landscape takes precedence. “And bigger was better, too.” The nifty illustrations, with their superprecise brush strokes and streamlined shapes, suggest a mid–20th-century architect's rendering of millennial space needles, cantilevers and suspension bridges. In his first book for children, veteran illustrator Bruce McCall has crafted a tale of ingenuity and mayhem about a town founded by inventors, with pictures. “We kids learned that faster was always better,” says the narrator. Marveltown is a utopian city of inventors, where drivers zip through tubular car washes at 80 mph and children “sky-ski” behind prop planes. Contributor McCall makes his picture book debut with a tongue-in-cheek vision of the future. ![]()
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