(++++) PAGING AMUSEMENTS

Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page. By Blanca Gómez. Rocky Pond Books. $18.99. 

     Optimist/pessimist. Glass half full/glass half empty. Upbeat/downbeat. Positive/negative. There are all sorts of ways to formulate the eternal back-and-forth between “always look on the bright side of life” and “but what about the dark side?” But few of those formulations are as amusingly nonjudgmental – and educational – as the ones Blanca Gómez creates in her stories about Bookie and Cookie. 

     Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page is the second of these, and like the original Bookie & Cookie, it builds on the clever premise that the characters are aware that they are in a book – and behave accordingly. This time, the two huge-circle-headed best friends start out on a completely blank page of the book, and are fully aware of how dull their environment is. Time to turn the page! That is the premise – one that starts ever-optimistic Bookie anticipating all the neat things that could show up on the next page, while always-pessimistic Cookie considers all the difficulties that might lurk just one page ahead. 

     What Gómez does extremely cleverly is to imagine how these cartoon characters might themselves draw the scenes that they imagine as the book goes on. Bookie anticipates turning the page to find “a bright sunny day,” and lo and behold, there is a two-page spread as Bookie might draw it, with a smiling sun (wearing Bookie-style eyeglasses), birds flying and happily singing, colorful flowers all about, and Bookie playing badminton with Cookie. The difference between Bookie drawn by Gómez and Bookie “drawn by Bookie” is especially clever and amusing. 

     And then readers turn the page to see what Cookie is imagining and “drawing,” in the form of “an awful stormy day,” with rain pouring so hard that a wall poster indicates that the planned “Cookie Picnic at the Park” has had to be canceled. Dark clouds, lightning, scowling faces, inside-out umbrellas, leaves blowing everywhere – oh, what a mess if Bookie and Cookie turn the page and Cookie turns out to be right! 

     The whole book proceeds along these lines. Bookie’s response to Cookie’s worries about a stormy day is to imagine meeting a new friend in the storm – one with a brightly colored umbrella that is big enough for all three kids. But, worries Cookie, what if she isn’t really a friend but turns out to be “someone naughty who wants to splash us?” Bookie refuses to take the bait – optimists will not be turned negative – and says maybe the newly discovered friend will know where all three kids can shelter from the storm in a bakery “and eat lots of cookies!” Cookie does not buy it – pessimists will not be turned positive – and says that even if the imagined new friend takes them to a cookie bakery, she may grab all the cookies for herself and refuse to share. 

     The “what if” scenarios continue page after page, and the blurring of Bookie’s and Cookie’s “reality” with their imagination continues as the imagined new friend becomes more and more real – that is, as real as Bookie and Cookie themselves are. Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page is unceasingly inventive at bringing kids into the Bookie-and-Cookie world while expanding that world’s dimensions, and the increasingly fantastical pages “drawn” by the title characters become more and more complex and amusing as the story goes on. An imagined circus parade “drawn” by Bookie, with all three friends marching in it (Bookie carrying a pennant that says “READ”), leads to a Cookie-imagined-and-drawn traffic jam that is upsetting to drivers including a giraffe, a hat-wearing fish, a peach, a penguin, a frowning emoji wearing a birthday-party hat, and more. Later there are imagined outdoor scenes packed with butterflies or mosquitoes, depending on which character is thinking them up. There is even a wonderful secret library that may, however, contain a book-gobbling monster. 

     The ultimate imagining here has Bookie thinking of a potential “page full of magic and wonder,” while Cookie worries about “a dull blank page full of nothing” – which, readers will recall even before Bookie reminds them, is where this whole story started. And that “reality” makes Cookie ready, at last, to turn the page – to a final scene packed with snippets of previously imagined locations and characters, all now drawn in the Gómez style rather than the imagined-by-the-characters one. This final two-page illustration, complete with the “library monster” happily reading a book to a circle of attentive kids and some of the “traffic-jam” drivers as the new-found friend brings Bookie and Cookie a piled-high platter of cookies, is an absolutely perfect ending for Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page – except that it is not the end. Not quite. Gómez reserves the very, very last page of the book for one showing the friends – three of them now – walking along, holding hands, and considering turning another page. That is an invitation to future adventures that will be enormously attractive not only to Bookie and Cookie and their new friend but also to every child (and probably every adult) lucky enough to have gone on this more-or-less imaginary journey through the bright and not-so-bright realms of the land of what-if.