One Potato Review

A splashy and optimistic rendering of one girl’s visit to her grandparents’ house, from the moment she spots them through the kitchen window to the time she says goodbye. This book was written by the guy who brought us The Phantom Tollbooth, and the temptation is therefore to go hunting around for omens and metaphors, though Juster only teases us with glimpses. That tiger living behind the bush? Just a cat. The tyrannosaurus peeking in through that kitchen window? The product of a lively imagination – but it’s not just the girl’s, and that is what’s odd: here, grandparents seem equally willing. Whole lives have been lived behind the faces in those windows (this is an interracial couple, for heaven sakes!) even if their grandchild is only just discovering it now. “When I get tired I come in and take my nap and nothing happens until I get up,” she suggests about twenty pages in, and if that sounds a little smug and incurious, at least it is honest. Because there’s so much to get to know about a person, and imagine, and extrapolate, sometimes we just owe ourselves a break.