"The child's seriousness in orchestrating these island activities will make perfect sense to readers-they know imagining isn't playtime. Pretending feels immensely personal, intimate even, and the child's emotive brown eyes show this in their intensity and, at times, vulnerability. Visual accents make the protagonist's tender age clear, as well as how extraordinarily dense, flamboyant, and boundless a very young child's imagination can be. Watercolors, colored pencils, and stitched red thread (which appears as dotted lines incorporated into each illustration) create vivid pictures of this pretend place, where anything can happen. Readers will certainly make the leap and stay a while."