Module 3: Jumanji

Book Summary:

While their parents are away for the evening, Judy and Peter find a board game in the park. At home they play the game and find that it is not all it seemed to be. Peter thinks the game is boring until real creatures from the game appear. Now the brother and sister must finish the game as fast as they can because ending the game is the only way to survive.

APA Reference:

Van Allsburg, C. (1981). Jumanji. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.

My Impressions:

I found the story simplistic in a good way. It really works well with the illustrations to tell the story. The pictures are almost like photographs. I found myself staring at them. This was the second book by Van Allsburg that I had read and I really enjoyed it. I was worried because I had seen the movie and knew the book would be different. The detail in the artwork is breathtaking. Even now I find details I missed the first time I looked, like a pipe on the self by the books when the kids start the game. I like that the parents in the end seem to know what the kids have been up to. Even Mrs. Budwing seems to hint that maybe finding the game wasn't an accident. 

Professional Review:

Jumanji is a jungle adventure board game come to life via the magic that, in Van Allsburg's world, is always waiting to leak into the everyday. With successive dice rolls, deepest, darkest Africa invades the neat, solid, formally arranged rooms of the unsuspecting players' house. The players-a blase brother and sister home alone-are momentarily dumbstruck but not really upset. They steadfastly go on with the game as monkeys, grinning with wicked gleam, raid the kirchen and hunker around the game board; rhinos charge intently through the living room (and righ into once line of vision); a Python coils on the mantel, its pattern set off by leafy slipcover design to give a jungle camoflage effect. S in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi (Houghton, 1979), which Jumaji outdoes in story terms, real ad unreal rub shoulders in three-dimensional drawings extraordinary for the multiplicity of gray tones the artist chives and the startling contrasts with brilliant white. The eye-fooling angles, looming shadows and shifting perspective are worthy of Hitchcock, yet all these "special effects" are supplied with only a pencil.-Pamela D. Pollack, "School Library Journal"

Pollack, P. (1981, May). [Review of the book Jumanji, by Chris Van Allsburg]. School Library Journal, 27(9), 60.

Library Uses:

I would use this book as part of a study of illustrators and how they are artists. This would be a collaborative project between the library and the art teachers.