The Carousel, written by Liz Rosenberg and illustrated by Jim Lamarche, is a first-person story of a girl riding magical horses with her sister. The soft, dark colors create an atmosphere of mystery. Before the girls see the horses, an illustration has clouds shaped like horses galloping across the sky for foreshadowing.
They go to the park and peek into the carousel tent, the rain coming down. The horses are alive; a picture shows the girls’ dropping their jaws in surprise at the horses prancing about. The main character swings herself onto her favorite horse’s back, and she and the horse fly into the air with her sister following them on a zebra. The other carousel horses join them, including mystical-white horses that contrast against the dark twilight. The horses run wild. “One stallion kicked over a park bench, knocking it backward to the ground. Another sent a trash can spinning dizzily through the air.” Her sister says it’s because the horses are broken. The girls ride home, take their mom’s old tools, and head back to the carousel with a lightning storm adding excitement. The main character fixes the carousel by removing a loose bolt. However, there is an inconsistency in the illustration and narration. The narration says she has a flashlight the size of a pen, but in the illustration, the flashlight is much bigger.
Even though the main character fixes the carousel, the horses remain wild, and a couple of ponies even fight over a bag filled with leftover food. But her sister takes out her flute from her flute case and plays “Claire de Lune.” The song does its magic as the book describes the horses forming a circle then moving slower and slower as if dancing. They resume their places on the carousel, and the girls go home and see their dad. They tell Dad they went to the park, and he says their mother used to say the park was magical in the rain.
The girls’ mother had died, and while the book doesn’t explicitly say that, it leaves subtle clues, such as the mother’s old clothes being stored in the garage and her toolbox being covered with dust. The main character has good memories of her mother, such as how her mother could fix anything. As she takes the tools, she sees the tools still shining and remembers her mother saying, “Take good care of your tools, and they’ll take good care of you.” One touching scene is where she doesn’t want to leave her favorite horse, and she describes the horse as smelling like “new-mown grass and my mother’s old wool coat.”
Publishers Weekly recommends this for kids ages four through eight, though I think older kids and even adults would love this. The fantastical adventure would enchant young children, and older audiences would appreciate the story’s gentle example of how to embrace the people you love in your heart even if they may not be with you.
The Carousel
Two sisters remember their mother saying, “The carousel horses sleep all winter and wake in the spring.” But one gray-skied February twilight, as the girls make their way home from school, they hear strange whinnying noises coming from the carousel in the park. Peeking inside the carousel canvas, the sisters step into the unknown. Could it be that the horses are moving . . . clopping their hooves . . . alive?
The cover is gorgeous!