One Potato Review

Paper cut-out people against cloudy, moody skies. A boy goes hiking in the mountains with his parents when – oops! – he falls off of a cliff. This opening device may strike some readers as jarring - like one of Roald Dahl’s rhinoceroses on the loose – though you cannot help paying closer attention to even the most insignificant details of cloud-games and cloud-parties that follow because, jeez, is this really all happening? What about his poor parents, for heaven sakes? Everyone’s fine in the end, but there’s a whiff of the elegiac when the boy who has fallen and been rescued cannot remember the magic words that will recall him to everything that happened in between. It’s an underrated trick to go from waking to dreaming and back again, and Burningham does it as well, and as boldly, as anyone. Good for many levels of understanding, and belief.