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The Dadmag Guide To Children's Books
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Tibet Through the Red Box
(Ages 9 and up)
In Tibet through the Red Box, Peter Sis creates a picture book that works both for adults and kids. The appeal is layered. The narrator's father, a Czech documentary film-maker, goes to film the Chinese building their road of occupation/modernization into Tibet, and gets lost after a landslide. Time passes but he finally returns to Prague where he tells his bed-ridden son myth-like tales about his experiences while lost. While sharing all of this, Sis also tells the story of the son's attempt to sort out memory, myth, and fact years later when he's called home to receive his father's diary of his time in Tibet, which has been kept in a red box. Laced with labyrinths, unexpected connections, and a meditation on the meaning of color, the book gives readers the sort of aesthetic sensation achieved by the best movies, novels, and poems. The final quotation, appropriately, is from Nabokov.
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