Michele Bledsoe

The Secret Kingdom by Michele & Richard Bledsoe
Genre: Fantasy
Source: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review

This book is wonderful, but at the same time hard to classify. We have the beautiful illustrations and then we have the beautiful poetry. Not everyone will get this book. I happen to be one of those quirky people that love things like this. We are welcomed into the world of dreams. The first page tells you that you can wear your monster suit and shows the other character as a masked face with leaves for hair and a wooden body with a wooden hand holding a heart. Then it tells you that it is good to share dreams with a friend. This is not a young kids picture book even though is says it is juvenile fiction. This is for the older child. Many of the pictures are so abstract they might not get them. One of my favorite is of the green alien. The message is one of being friendly to strangers from a faraway land. It also talks about the universality of pictures. You don’t have to speak the same language to understand art. A lot of the art is symbolic in meaning as is the wordage. I would definitely recommend this book to the older child. My copy is being passed to a fellow teacher as he fell in love with the book and wanted to share it with his daughter.… (meer)