The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard »

Gregory Rogers won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal (the English Caldecott) for his illustrations for Way Home, published in 1994. Other books he has illustrated include Lucy's Bay and Tracks.

A comic romp through Shakespeare's London featuring an intrepid little boy, a friendly bear, and-in the role of dastardly villain-the Bard himself.

What happens when a boy bursts through the curtain of a deserted theatre and onto the world's most famous stage? He lands on the Bard himself and the chase is on-through the streets of Shakespeare's London. This is a rare and inventive visual feast-a runaway story about a curious boy, a magic cloak, a grumpy bard, a captive bear and a baron bound for the chopping block. It is also a richly illustrated, dramatic and very funny tale of adventure and friendship.

Publishers Weekly

Australian artist Rogers's (Way Home) very funny wordless escapade, which gets even better with rereading, opens when a modern-day boy boots his soccer ball through the backstage window of an empty theater. He retrieves the ball, looks out on rows of empty seats, then tries on a blouse and red cape that he finds in the costume trunks. (There's a strange, spotlit glow about the cape.) When the ball bounces through the curtains again, the boy darts after it, tumbles into a time warp and emerges on the open-air stage of the Globe Theater. Gap-toothed, poxy groundlings hoot at his entrance, but a certain red-haired playwright trips on the ball and becomes as enraged as any Keystone Kop. Pursued by the Bard, the boy dashes outside, into a 17th-century London dotted with timbered houses and rival theaters. Here, the boy rescues a caged Bear and, hand-in-paw, the two elude the snarling Shakespeare; when they detour into a dungeon, they meet a Baron whose anxious glances at an outdoor chopping block and a guy with an axe suggest that an execution will soon occur. Rogers's sequential art and comic timing recall Quentin Blake's Clown. He uses a caricaturish style to animate the slapstick characters, while his English architecture and countryside are technically precise. London Bridge features rows of heads on stakes, and aristocrats cruise the Thames on a party barge. With its harried pace and sportive sight gags-not to mention its undignified rendering of Shakespeare-this chase comedy proves to be a bravura performance. Ages 5-9. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.