Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Rendered in oil pastels, Chan's (Music for the Tsar of the Sea) softly focused, shadowy paintings at once capture a Victorian sensibility and the ethereal, romantic tenor of Dickens's lyrical parable about the cycle of life. Marked by a verbal economy not usually associated with this novelist, the narrative describes a traveler who sets out upon a "magic journey [that] was to seem very long when he began it, and very short when he got halfway through." Along the way he makes several stops: he spends time with a beautiful child who "is always at play"; a handsome boy who is "always learning" (but finds time to partake in "the merriest games that ever were played"); and later a young man who announces, "I am always in love." Chan's illustrations hint at the story's outcome as he charts the resemblance between the boy, the young man and finally the old man who is "always remembering. Come and remember with me!" On a final spread, all the traveler's friends reappear and bring the tale full circle. Though youngsters may need shepherding through this unabashedly sentimental journey, readers young and old will appreciate Dickens's vision and honesty, as well as Chan's evocative artwork. All ages. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
School Library Journal
Gr 3-6-Originally published as a short story in the mid-1800s, this allegory for life's journey introduces a traveler who joins and "loses" various companions along the way. He meets a child who is always at play, a boy who is always learning, a young man who is always in love, a grown man who is always working, and, finally, an old man who is always remembering. Players come and go while the observing wayfarer moves inexorably forward and the tone of the narrative and the illustrations darkens. Chan's dramatic, often murky paintings, rendered in oil pastels, reveal the companions at rest or at work while the never-depicted traveler remains offstage. Children are likely to understand Dickens's comparison of life and journeys. However, with no plot, an enigmatic intrusive nod to "grandfather" (the old man) at the end, and various unfamiliar Victorian circumlocutions and references, this easy introduction to allegory may not find an audience.-Susan Hepler, Burgundy Farm Country Day School, Alexandria, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Chan (Music for the Tsar of the Sea, 1998, etc.) illustrates one of Dickens's lesser-known Christmas stories (in this case there's only a passing reference to the holiday) with lustrous, full-page scenes of figures in antique dress, slightly hazy as if viewed through a scrim, and moving through shadowy woods. It's an allegorical journey, in which a never-seen traveler is accompanied for a time, in turn, by a child, a student, a young swain, and a hardworking family man, then sits down at the end with an elder to bring them all back in memory. Except for one brief omission, the author's stately, eloquent, sentiment-rich narrative is left untouched: "They had plenty of the finest toys in the world and the most astonishing picture books: all about scimitars and slippers and turbans, and dwarfs and giants and genii and fairies, and blue-beards and bean-stalks and riches and caverns and forests and Valentines and Orsons: and all new and all true." Still among the greatest of "crossover" writers, Dickens broadens the appeal of this most ancient of metaphors by casting it as a tale told by a child—and it positively begs to be read aloud. (Picture book. 9-11, adult)
