Infinite Possibilities: Not a Box by Antoinette Portis

What parent, stuck with the tough job of assembling and setting up a birthday or Christmas gift, hasn't been bemused at the sight of a young child playing with the box the thing came in for hours, while the manufactured "toy" sits untouched in lonely plastic isolation?

Antoinette Portis' Not a Box, winner of the Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor Medal (for books for early readers), takes this familiar scene and turns it into a simple work of art. Wrapped in a symbolically plain brown paper cover, this little book takes only 64 words to explain how, in the imagination of a child, a box is not just a box, but whatever the human mind can conceive.

Portis uses a simple black flat line drawing of a little rabbit sitting in a black line rectangle against a textured white page, while on the facing verso page, done in brown, the supposed adult "voice-over" asks the question

"Why are you sitting in a box?"

"It's not a box."

the little rabbit replies matter-of-factly.

And indeed, in that moment, it is not. It's a bright red race car speeding away, shown on a bright yellow page as an overlay over the black rectangle. Following pages offer similarly clueless remarks from the "off camera" adult: "Why are you squirting a box?" and "Why are you wearing a box," as the opposite page shows the little rabbit as a fireman hosing down a flaming red burning building or inside an imposing red robot constructed around the original rectangle. The answer remains the same: "It's not a box." Finally the slightly exasperated voice asks, "Well, what is it then!"

"It's my not-a-box."

A simple brown cardboard box, as we see, can be the howdah on an elephant's back, the crow's nest of a pirate ship, the gondola of a hot-air balloon, or a rocket ship to the moon, depending upon our fancy, and this little book does an amazing job of exploiting this weighty theme in a few lines and in even fewer words. Design is the key to this book, with the adult's questions on a ho-hum brown page, the little rabbit and his plain-Jane box always on a white page, and his glorious imaginings presented against a vibrant yellow or red backdrop.

Not a Box, is a great book for any preschooler. Just be sure to have a plain brown box to go with it and see what comes from putting the two together!