The Seven Chairs (Venture-Health & the Human Body) - Hardcover

MARYANN KOVALSKI has written and illustrated over 25 books, including Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, The Seven Chairs, and The Wheels on the Bus. She lives with her husband, two children, and their dog in Toronto, Ontario.

Kindergarten-Grade 4-One of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (Houghton, 1984) revolves around seven chairs, one of which ends up in Notre Dame Cathedral as the magical vehicle for a flying (or at least floating) nun. Lanteigne does a creditable job of extrapolating from Chris Van Allsburg's surrealistic excerpt by emulating his spare prose and creating her own tongue-in-cheek tangents. With only a few sentences each, she describes the seven seats made by a poor craftsman during his lifetime and the fate of each piece of furniture. Some chairs are eventually broken, lost, or auctioned while others take on mystical properties (one helps save the lives of 15 sailors who are swept overboard) or descend to duty as a door prop. Lanteigne's oddly wistful tale would be a challenging proposition for any artist. Unfortunately, Kovalski seems a little at sea here. While her gouache paintings have their own charm and playfulness, they seem at odds with the text. One scene, a two-page spread of the carpenter's daughter tumbling down a hillside, miniature chair abandoned Hitty-like to the field, conveys just the right amount of blithe indifference ("Softly and slowly, it became part of the world around it"). But overall, her style is too cartoonish to do justice to Lanteigne's inscrutable allegory.
John Sigwald, Unger Memorial Library, Plainview, TX
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.