The Dreamer Book

This precious jewel of a book is marred only by not ending where it should have. Ryan and Peter Sis, who get equal billing on the jacket, have created an exquisite piece of art. Prose, poetry and picture are skillfully interwoven and seamlessly merged in the story of a sickly, dreamy boy who lives in Temuco, Chile.

It's the perfect spot for a dreamer like Neftali, equidistant from the Pacific and the Andes, the roar of the sea and the rumbling of a volcano. It's the gateway to the Araucanian forest, home to the indigenous Mapuche people and exotic and mysterious creatures like the rhinocerous beetle and the Chucao bird.

But Neftali's domineering father, determined to toughen up his son, continually works to constrict the boy's wandering mind and sensitive soul. The father feels that Neftali is too much like his gentle, departed mother, and relies too much on his kind stepmother.

Through the power of words and images, which Sis, in his marvelous way, floats across the pages, the shy and meek Neftali learns to fiercely hold on to what makes him original and unique. He seizes the oppportunity to pour his creativity into print. And when his father burns his notebooks and papers, an ember still glows in the ashes of the fire.

If only that was where Ryan and Sis stopped. Neftali turns out to be Pablo Neruda, and the authors, albeit briefly, insist on following him to college in Santiago and launching his career as a world-famous poet.

This grown-up part of the book, incandescent as the story of a boy, felt tacked on. Such information would have been better served in the author's note. Despite the clever image of a book becoming a bird, it was exposition that failed, unlike the rest of this radiant work, to fly.