Wherever You Are

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 19, 2010

As a child frolics in a magical version of the natural world, the narrator coos her enduring parental love: "I wanted you more/ than you ever will know,/so I sent love to follow/ wherever I go." The child, of neutral ethnicity and indeterminate gender (thanks to an orange bucket hat and compositions that always show him or her in profile or from behind) is one lucky kid: there's a piggyback ride on a hippo, apple-picking with the help of an albino giraffe, a park bench chat with pandas, and a snooze that literally entails lying down with the lambs. Tillman's (On the Night You Were Born) digital artwork teeters of the edge of saccharine, and she's too fond of dancing blobs of lights. But she has an unerring instinct for dramatic composition in these pages, readers get the sense of spying on a secret world and her potent combination of unapologetic sentiment, fantasy, photorealism, and painterliness has an undeniable allure. As with her other books, the real audience is probably grownups looking for a misty-eyed interlude. Ages 4 8.