Dreaming Up

Review
By Horn Book Magazine

Building—with blocks or sand, sticks or other improvisatory materials—is one of childhood’s most entertaining forms of play. Here, fifteen such play building projects are deftly rendered in mixed-media collage and paired with photos of iconic buildings that look like they could have been inspired by imaginative children’s constructions. A toddler’s upside-down stack of graduated plastic doughnuts resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum; a “pillow fort” mimics Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. Concrete poems describe the children’s structures. . . . While lots of books show children how to play, this one suggests that using what’s at hand to “dream up” new things is vital to creativity: as the book’s epigraph says, “If they can dream it, they can build it.”