Books like Weslandia
By Paul Fleischman
For the kid who'd rather invent an entire world than follow the one everybody else lives in, Weslandia hands over the blueprint. Inventive, sunny, quietly triumphant.
A collection of poems invites young readers through seven die-cut doorways into moods and moments — a dragon piñata, an alligator on the A train, a hungry yeti — turning everyday feelings into flights of imagination.
An imaginative boy dreams up the ultimate house, sketching in a racetrack, a flying playroom, and a gigantic slide as his ideas grow wilder with every rhyme.
Two curious kids set off on a wonder walk through nature, asking playful questions about the world — is the sun a light bulb, is dirt the earth's skin — and seeing everything anew.
A white shape drifts across page after page of blue sky, looking like a rabbit, a bird, an ice-cream cone, and more — until a final reveal answers what it really is.
A girl named Marian discovers a rocky desert hill across the road and transforms it with her sisters and friends into Roxaboxen — a whole imagined town built from stones, old boxes, and pure invention.
A young inventor imagines the ultimate car — complete with a snack bar, a swimming pool, and a robot chauffeur named Robert — then takes it out for a wild test drive with his dad.
A little girl with a boundless imagination becomes a mermaid, a wolf-raised boy, a wonderland wanderer, and more, turning cushions into castles and boxes into boats.
A young Chinese American girl notices color everywhere in her everyday world, from red dragons and firecrackers to lychees, and brown in her own teddy bear.
A boy finds a salamander in the woods and imagines turning his own bedroom into a perfect woodland home, adding moss, trees, and stars to keep it happy.
An author-illustrator named Harris Burdick vanishes, leaving behind fourteen mysterious drawings with only a title and a single line of text each — and no story to explain them.
A child imagines an entire day as a horse — galloping through familiar settings, wondering if they'd fit in their clothes, and whether a little sister would get a ride.
A team of kid inventors heads to the zoo armed with zany traps and rhyming plans, determined to outsmart and catch the rainbow-maned unicorn.
