The Museum of Everything
REVIEW BY EMILY MORGAN
The Museum of Everything is anything but an ordinary children’s book. It’s more like a trip you might take to an art museum. And author-illustrator Lynne Rae Perkins is the docent who leads you through this museum, encouraging you to think and imagine. Her watercolor works of art show up in stark rooms or sometimes rooms stuffed with curiosity and concepts. An ornately framed bush or a shriveled leaf becomes art exhibits to ponder. The reader is encouraged to embrace stillness while at the same time the mind is reeling with possibility.
This story has brought to life the idea that all children need time and space to think and create. Imagine a child who stares at the clouds and imagines a world within them or one who looks at an electrical outlet and sees a face staring back. This book is like that cherished under-the-bed shoebox that a child pulls out on a day when the television and computer are off-limits.
The author invites children’s brains to go “meta,” so that a rock in a puddle becomes an island and then proceeds from there to become so many other things. It’s like nesting dolls of ideas that help a child start small and then think big.
Museums are fun places to visit. While at your favorite museum, you might have a map or a docent to lead you, or you might just ramble around looking for a place that interests you at the moment and then stares at a sculpture for an hour. That is the beauty of the experience that is captured in this book. It is less story and more scenario. The Museum of Everything is its own masterpiece for the ages where your child can explore everything—real and imagined—over and over again.